COVID-19 and digital privacy

The rapid rollout of digital health approaches in the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has neglected to prioritize data privacy and is a missed opportunity for building users’ trust in these technologies for future outbreaks and quotidian healthcare.

Home monitoring technologies are being rushed to market during the COVID-19 pandemic; here, safety and privacy considerations are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an accelerated development of applications for digital health, including symptom monitoring and contact tracing. Their potential is wide ranging and must be integrated into conventional approaches to public health for best effect.

To support progress in genomic epidemiology, a transparent, user-friendly approach is required.

We call upon the research community to standardize efforts to use daily self-reported data about COVID-19 symptoms in the response to the pandemic and to form a collaborative consortium to maximize global gain while protecting participant privacy.

Mobile apps provide a convenient source of tracking and data collection to fight against the spread of COVID-19. We report our analysis of 50 COVID-19-related apps, including their use and their access to personally identifiable information, to ensure that the right to privacy and civil liberties are protected.

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates, teams around the world are now advocating for a new approach to monitoring transmission: tapping into cellphone location data to track infection spread and warn people who may have been exposed. Here we present data collected in Israel through this approach so far and discuss the privacy concerns, alternatives and different ‘flavors’ of cellphone surveillance. We also propose safeguards needed to minimize the risk for civil rights.

The past decade has allowed the development of a multitude of digital tools. Now they can be used to remediate the COVID-19 outbreak.

Large-scale collection of data could help curb the COVID-19 pandemic, but it should not neglect privacy and public trust. Best practices should be identified to maintain responsible data-collection and data-processing standards at a global scale.

Reuse of patient data for research purposes could be very fruitful. However, too seldom are those whom the data are from—the patients—involved in how their data should be used.

Protect privacy, equality and fairness in digital contact tracing with these key questions.

Contact-tracing apps could help keep countries open before a vaccine is available. But do we have a sufficient understanding of their efficacy, and can we balance protecting public health with safeguarding civil rights? We interviewed five experts, with backgrounds in digital health ethics, internet law and social sciences.

Analysis of data from a smartphone-based app designed for large-scale tracking of potential COVID-19 symptoms, used by over 2.5 million participants in the United Kingdom and United States, shows that loss of taste and smell sensations is predictive of potential SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Combining fine-scale social contact data with epidemic modeling reveals interactions among contact tracing, quarantine, testing and physical distancing for controlling COVID-19.

An agent-based model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission shows that testing, contact tracing and household quarantine could keep new COVID-19 waves under control while allowing the reopening of the economy with minimal social-distancing interventions.