Social Media Wading Into COVID-19 Notification
September 2, 2020
Apple and Google are collaborating on a system that will let public health agencies alert people by smartphone when they might have had significant contact with someone with COVID-19—and for those who go on to test positive, their close contacts may get a notification as well. But such systems raise questions of personal privacy, a molecular biologist noted in an Issues online exclusive, cautioning that they “set a significant precedent for normalizing mass surveillance and integrating digital and biological surveillance tools into daily life” and thus deserve close public attention.