Entering a Brave New World: After COVID-19
Just a short few months ago, our world was turned upside down by the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Airline travel plummeted, non-essential businesses were closed, social distancing was encouraged and eventually mandatory lockdowns were put in place, all in the hopes to mitigate the deadly spread. In some sense, public health measures have always relied on some form of monitoring, but never has this been more true or widespread than in governments’ responses to the novel coronavirus. In attempts to stem the waves of the pandemic, more than thirty governments have implemented temporary or indefinite measures to trace and identify infected individuals or supervise quarantines. Many of these efforts, despite the sound logic of initial intentions, provide a fertile breeding ground for privacy violation and future exploitation.
Across the world, in a scramble to contain the pandemic, dozens of smartphone tracking apps are being deployed or are in the last stages of development. Back in February, China made it regulation for residents in hundreds of cities to download a health code app to monitor their quarantine. Norway’s new app relies on GPS and Bluetooth data from voluntary users, information that is then accessed by government health authorities to advance their contact tracing measures. One of the more extreme measures can be found in Hong Kong, where arrivals into airports are assigned electronic tracking bracelets synced to their smartphone’s GPS software. In countries like India who offer little in terms of privacy or data protection laws, the rush to adopt virus-tracking technologies like state-sponsored app Aarogya Setu have dangerous implications. Since the virus reached India’s borders in early March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed draconian measures to silence criticism from both student activists and journalists. The invasive tracking of quarantine through GPS, drones, geotagged pictures and Bluetooth has prompted
concern that an unprecedented scale of surveillance is being unleashed, with Indian author Arundhati Roy noting that “pre-corona, if we were sleepwalking into the surveillance state, now we are panic-running into [it]”. For many authoritarian states, the coronavirus has become a means to leverage health and safety for social control.
Moreover, location tracking technology is just the gateway into a brave new world, the COVID-19 response reeling through a variety of new surveillance algorithms. Language of ‘immunity passports’ is gaining momentum as countries like Germany, Italy and Britain consider their exit strategies out of lockdown; In its simplest form, governments’ would allow virally immune individuals to return to their businesses, in effect leveraging peoples’ antibodies to mitigate the fast-plummeting economic collapse. In the UK, tech firms like Onfido are in talks with politicians about using facial biometrics to create a form of health passports, a biometrics recognition system which could be harnessed by the NHS in a matter of months. From Apple ID eye scanners to Fitbit’s heart rate trackers (recently purchased by the multi-billion enterprise Google), physiological identification and data collection has moved from the realms of science fiction to science fact. With the lines between privacy laws and crisis containment fast approaching a crossroads, how long before biological information becomes enmeshed with digital surveillance?
Although exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the modern surveillance state has long been in the works since the turn of the century. Unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic, ministers in the United Kingdom are currently seeking to expand the depth of the Investigatory Powers Act, often dubbed the Snooper’s Charter, to allow more public bodies access to mobile data; As of 2016, it has been law for web and phone companies to stockpile users’ web browsing history for 12 months while giving complete access to police, security services and state agencies. Edward Snowden, famed
US whistleblower, once likened the act as the “most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West”. Across the Atlantic Ocean, US citizens still live and breathe the state of a post 9/11 surveillance apparatus via the Patriot Act.
On a more global scale, China’s growing market dominance in surveillance equipment, its lax in user accountability and a flexible loan system has made it possible for governments to afford the technology who previously could not; Ecuador’s surveillance system ECU-911, a total 4,300 high-powered camera system sprawling from the Galapagos Islands to the Amazonian jungle, was purchased from Chinese firms Huawei and C.E.I.E.C. in exchange for huge swaths of its oil reserves. Many argue that rather than tackle crime rates, these camera installations have primarily served the state’s internal intelligence agency National Intelligence Secretariat to monitor and persecute political or social activists, a page straight out of China’s totalitarian playbook. Copies of this network have been sold worldwide to Venezuela, Bolivia, Germany, United Arab Emirates and more, this flow of surveillance potentially underpinning a future of tech-based authoritarianism in the name of ‘public
security’.
In all the data collection and monitoring resulting from the current coronavirus response, a troublesome future broods. Once the curtains are lifted, a vaccine is championed and the pandemic is announced as over, these GPS tracking softwares and facial biometric services will not simply disappear. Rather, the technologies have a disturbing potential for abuse for a host of unintended purposes, particularly as tools of political suppression. For the avid readers of the dystopia genre, many will recall George Orwell’s famous opening line in 1984:
It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The thirteenth strike is an old saying, one which calls into question the very world we live in. Just as World War II drastically changed Orwell’s reality in the 1940s, the recent turn of events in 2020 is gradually creating a new normal for us. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken thousands of lives, upended societies and destroyed economic livelihoods, but perhaps one of its more enduring and
insidious legacies will be the new age of digital surveillance that is fast dawning upon us.
Banner image courtesy of Elvert Barnes via Wikimedia, ©2020, some rights reserved.
