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Journal of Law and the Biosciences
COVID-19 contact tracing apps: a stress test for privacy, the GDPR, and data protection regimesDigital surveillance has played a key role in containing the COVID-19 outbreak in China, Singapore, Israel, and South Korea. Google and Apple recently announced the intention to build interfaces to allow Bluetooth contact tracking using Android and iPhone devices. In this article, we look at the compatibility of the proposed Apple/Google Bluetooth exposure notification system with Western privacy and data protection regimes and principles, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Somewhat counter-intuitively, the GDPR’s expansive scope is not a hindrance, but rather an advantage in conditions of uncertainty such as a pandemic. Its principle-based approach offers a functional blueprint for system design that is compatible with fundamental rights. By contrast, narrower, sector-specific rules such as the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and even the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), leave gaps that may prove difficult to bridge i...
Journal of Technology in Human Services
Tackling COVID-19 is a crucible for privacy2021 •
2021 •
The extraordinary speed with which the Covid-19 virus has been spreading throughout the world, penetrating the fabric of distant countries and traditions, revolutionising their daily habits and gestures, has pushed governments to find far-reaching emergency solutions. These interventions have inevitably impacted the sphere of recognised and guaranteed rights that represent the ‘beating heart’ of democratic constitutional systems. In a landscape characterised by continuous digital evolution, the search for remedies has invariably concentrated also on technology tools, such as remote working platforms, body temperature scanners, food and grocery delivery apps, whose peculiar characteristics have immediately become great allies against the spread of the virus. In the wake of the first experiments carried out in China and South Korea, the possibility of adopting contact tracing tools to support the diagnostic activities to reconstruct the chain of infection has strongly emerged. However, the results obtained have been somewhat disappointing so far. In a pandemic scenario where the potentialities of technological tools could be a fundamental weapon in fighting the virus, the various experiences of digital contact tracing have highlighted the need for an extensive analysis of the relationship between individual rights and technologies. The paper aims to highlight two crucial lessons that can be learnt from this first phase of digital implementation in a time of crisis, and their impacts on the future evolution of technology in democratic societies
Ethics and Information Technology
Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containmentThe rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively (e.g., with a backend system, but possibly also with other citizens), voluntarily, only when the citi...
Big Data & Society
Innovation under pressure: Implications for data privacy during the Covid-19 pandemic2020 •
The global Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in social and economic disruption unprecedented in the modern era. Many countries have introduced severe measures to contain the virus, including travel restrictions, public event bans, non-essential business closures and remote work policies. While digital technologies help governments and organizations to enforce protection measures, such as contact tracing, their rushed deployment and adoption also raises profound concerns about surveillance, privacy and data protection. This article presents two critical cases on digital surveillance technologies implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic and delineates the privacy implications thereof. We explain the contextual nature of privacy trade-offs during a pandemic and explore how regulatory and technical responses are needed to protect privacy in such circumstances. By providing a multidisciplinary conversation on the value of privacy and data protection during a global pandemic, this article reflects on the implications digital solutions have for the future and raises the question of whether there is a way to have expedited privacy assessments that could anticipate and help mitigate adverse privacy implications these may have on society.
Białostockie Studia Prawnicze / Bialystok Legal Studies
The Use of Covid-19 Digital Applications and Unavoidable Threats to the Protection of Health Data and Privacy2021 •
This paper starts with a dilemma. How to ensure the adequate protection of individual health data and privacy in a global pandemic, which has intensified the use of digital applications for the purposes of data sharing and contact-tracing? There is no simple answer to this question when choosing between the protection of public health and individual privacy. However, the history of the existing case-law regarding infectious diseases control, both Polish and European, teaches about numerous examples in which health data and privacy were not adequately protected, but, on the contrary, were misused leading to human rights infringements. In light of this case law and public health ethics, this paper argues radically that the use of digital applications to fight the Covid-19 pandemic has not been sufficiently justified at least in the Polish context. Especially, unconvincing benefits from the use of these tools do not outweigh the likelihood of human rights infringements with far-reachin...
Studies in health technology and informatics
Data Privacy, Regulations and Legal Issues on COVID-19 Tracking Apps: A Scoping ReviewIt cannot be deniable that smartphone apps have grown exponentially and are playing a crucial role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries. This paper aims to investigate data privacy, regulations and legal issues on COVID-19 tracking apps. A literature search will be followed the PRISMA guidelines extension for a scoping review. The search will be conducted on PubMed and Google Scholar. A total of 38 articles from 7,626 articles were reviewed. Mostly articles report on data privacy. Not many articles report on regulations and legal issues. However, there are many challenges on COVID-19 applications such as security risks, privacy issues, political, ethical, and legal risks, and standardization issues.
Science and Engineering Ethics
Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing2021 •
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies.
Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science
Inhibition of choriocapillaris regeneration with genisteinArxiv preprint astro-ph/ …
Temporal and Spectral Characteristics of Short Bursts from the Soft Gamma Repeaters 1806-20 and 1900+ 142001 •
2011 •
2017 •
2002 •
Journal of medical primatology
Detection of Toxoplasma gondii antibodies in captive non-human primates in the Amazon region, Brazil2017 •
2016 •
European Financial and Accounting Journal
Relationship between Liquidity and Profitability: Empirical Study from the Czech Republic2016 •
2019 •
Sensors
A Two-Step Method for Dynamic Parameter Identification of Indy7 Collaborative Robot Manipulator2022 •
27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW'07)
A P2P Groupware Framework based on Operational Transformations2007 •
Schizophrenia Research
Smaller corpus callosum subregions containing motor fibers in schizophrenia2005 •
2000 •
2014 •
Veterinarski Arhiv
The influence of HVT FC 126 given by means of nebulization compared to parenteral vaccination on chickens immunocompetent cell transformation2016 •
Grassroots Journal of Natural Resources
Socio-Economic Determinants of Maize Production of Smallholder Farmers in Eastern Oromia, Ethiopia2021 •
2014 •
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Nonlinear Science and Complexity
A Web Framework for Advanced and Intensive Nonlinear Time Series Analysis