The big question, post-COVID, was if a permanent surveillance infrastructure was here to stay.
In the desperate scramble to halt the spread of the coronavirus through the spring and summer of 2020, governments around the world began instituting health monitoring policies, leveraging GPS and other data on phones and watches and fitness bands.
“Smart technologies being used in smart ways,” many thought. But concerns about surveillance – which had been growing for a number of years – also flared up, as the long-term implications of a permanent surveillance infrastructure became apparent.
Pre-COVID-19, legislation such as GDPR in Europe, POPI in South Africa and APPI in Japan had emerged, based on a recognition that personal data was a new source of economic wealth and that this wealth was accruing to a small number of large technology companies – not to the providers of that data.
The need to stop the virus, however, overruled misgivings about data privacy, and leaders in Israel, China and South Korea forged ahead with sophisticated monitoring policies, particularly after initial exhortations to practice social distancing and self isolation fell on deaf ears. What had seemed like calls for good old-fashioned common sense were ignored by those without it – especially younger individuals, who continued to gather in groups, use public transport (still running for essential workers) and socialize as though nothing was wrong.
The most draconian (or sensible, depending on your point of view) policy took hold in China, where the use of smartphone data and facial recognition cameras (already used in the country’s controversial social credit system) obliged individuals to self-report their temperature and medical condition on a daily basis. Using these measures, the government could effectively track and, in some cases, forcibly isolate individuals considered high risk, as well as identify those with whom they’d come into contact. In Singapore, mobile apps helped people identify infected and at-risk individuals. In Israel, technology intended to track and monitor terrorist activity was deployed to watch the health conditions of ordinary law-abiding citizens.
Proponents of health monitoring argued that extraordinary times required extraordinary measures – that safety takes priority over everything else. But civil liberty-oriented critics claimed that a dangerous precedent was being set, and questioned whether politicians really understood the implications of their actions and just how drastic the fallout could be. For years, surveillance capitalism had been insidiously creeping into every corner of our lives, and the dust from the Cambridge Analytica scandal had only just settled (a little) as the virus hit. Many people had become suspicious of the data giants; in the middle of the Corona crunch, a British law firm had advised its employees working from home to turn off smart speakers while on client calls in a bid to prevent the recording of sensitive information.
Some said the introduction of Black Mirror-style social monitoring was only a temporary, necessary phenomenon – that this type and level of surveillance would end as the crisis waned. History, though, paints a very different picture. One has only to look at the U.S. wartime surveillance that lived on well after the first and second world wars in programs such as Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK to see how things might unfold. The press censorship and land confiscation policies of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence are still in place. Governments could very well argue that in order to prevent a reoccurrence of COVID-19 or the emergence of some new pandemic, stringent data checks need to remain.
What terrifies many is that it isn’t just clicks and likes that are analyzed but also our health, movement and biometric data that – when combined – can be used (is being used) to not just see what you look at but how you physically respond to this input, as well. Put simply, our very emotions are now capable of being tracked and analyzed.
Of course, during the COVID-19 crisis, surveillance sounded sensible, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In a post-virus age, are we finally seeing the true death of privacy? Are we finally answering the question many people have posed over the years: How did 1984 happen?
