With all this chaos and fear spreading around COVID-19 lots of developers try to help stopping the virus by implementing useful tools. That’s heroic and should be supported, people need to stand together and help each other.

However — unfortunately the fear of the virus seems to be so immense, that everything else is being overlooked. Tools are built that track users with no regard to their privacy whatsoever. And people actually use them because they are not aware of the dangers that lie within those tools.

A basic human right in a democracy is (or should I say used to be) the “Right to privacy”. “Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy” states Wikipedia [1].

“The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable.” The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Article 10

It seems modern civilization has forgotten why this was declared to be a basic human right. Governments won’t care about your privacy unless you do. The increased acceptance rate for being tracked among the population - driven by fear — can be abused.

Yes, COVID-19 should be taken seriously and yes, we should build tools to fight it. In fact we should have had them ready BEFORE a pandemic even hits. As with most mistakes that we as individuals and us as humanity make, we only learn that the stove is too hot to be touched after touching it once and burning our fingers. We could have planned ahead and built useful tools to aid us in such a scenario.

There are ways to build the very same tools that can help us in stopping a pandemic in a way that respects our privacy. We can have the same data available for analysis and decision making without giving up on our right to privacy.