Privacy Review for Pandemic Response Program

Our commitment to protecting privacy during pandemic response

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Inspiration

The future depends on what we do in the present -- Mahatma Gandhi

In the last weeks, a growing number of public health authorities, all over the world, are trying to figure out how to contain the spread of CoViD-19. Day after day, new applications are being spun up by individuals, big tech firms and governments around the world to achieve a high level of accuracy with contamination and contact tracing. In most cases, this is only possible by collecting and analyzing personal information about large numbers of identifiable people, including their health, travel, and personal relationships.

Special efforts by public health agencies must be granted, and we understand that: the State has special duties and rights, and digital and physical policies, must reflect a balance between the collective good and the civil liberties in order to protect the health and safety of our society from disease outbreaks.

While there are quite a few privacy aspects that have the potential to be abused, a few remain on top of our minds as we perform the review and advice to the regulators and developers:

  • Discrimination
  • Transparency
  • Proportionality
  • Abuse and Misuse

What it does

If you are an independent developer, or a team of collective, trying to stand up such a critical response app, we are here to help. As of today, we are initiating our novel “Privacy Review for Pandemic Response Program” to help independent developers and small-medium teams with a FREE privacy review to support the ongoing pandemic response to help achieve a balance between critical safety measures and privacy measures.

If you are:

  • Working on an app, web app, or any other piece of technology that will be using any sort of user data for Covid-19 rapid response, we are offering advice on implementing privacy-preserving features.

  • A regulator or decision-maker who isn’t sure what standards should be put in place for these emergency-focused apps, we are providing expertise and guidance.

How we built it

The global spread of COVID-19 has compelled governments, thinkers, innovators, and technologists and futurists to kick in high gear and help enable mitigation measures to combat the immediate, short term and long term impact fro the pandemic. Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease.

As the response measures continue to evolve, we have kept an eye on the state of privacy. We have been keeping a close eye on any new developments on the legislative and technological advancement and modifications. We have curated a list of appropriate technical and legal controls that need to be in place while allowing the data to be processed for pandemic response use. Due to existing expertise, we have gathered a few answers and constantly looking for others. This is how we consider this approach a healthy dose of "privacy" which otherwise may be dangerously ignored.

Challenges we ran into

  • Lack of global collaboration - most nations are operating in silos without universal guidelines
  • Lack of direct connection to key stakeholders- As a small non-profit, we do not have access to WHO, CDC, and other Govt. Officials, like some big tech firms, do and can influence the narrative and decisions to their benefits.
  • Not enough time - If we had more time, we could already build this into an automated portal (which we still plan on)
  • Not enough resources - While we continue to gather expert volunteers, it may not be enough, given the number of apps that are being pushed into the market.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Quickly coming together as a team and standing up a whole program, in a matter of days

What we learned

  • Connections play an important part in making an impact at a global level
  • There is no need to review or suspend the rules on the protection of personal data. The way we’ll manage this clash between fundamental rights is the way we’ll shape our “new normal”.

What's next for Privacy Review for Pandemic Response Program

  • Gather resources to build a scalable model
  • Involve global agencies and governments to pledge for privacy-preserving processes and methods and help the world adopt these measures

Built With

  • ccpa
  • fda-guidelines
  • gdpr
  • hhs-guidelines
  • hipaa
  • nist
  • privacy-guidelines
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