TL;DR: US National Security Agency whistleblower and international privacy advocate Edward Snowden recently promoted a whitepaper he insisted provides “bottom-line principles phone-based contact-tracing systems must follow to comply with basic rights,” as technology giants like Apple and Google rollout pandemic tracking smartphone applications.

Civil Liberties Whitepaper Answer to Apple and Google

For Bitcoiners, privacy and its protection are keys to the entire cryptocurrency project. In just about every instance, the race to either have privacy-oriented coins or applications geared toward providing greater transaction anonymity dominates a given community’s conversation and debate. That discussion is often blurred with the outside world and ongoing events — the two wind up influencing one another.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is the current king example. Not only is it causing havoc with global economies, of course, but its fallout also created an “in” for every government around the world to institute new policies that challenge privacy advocates’ assumptions about basic civil liberties. With most policy, problems arise when analysts attempt to reconcile a new program’s goal with what it hopes to help or prevent.

An example early in the COVID-19 spread proved illustrative. By mid-March of 2020, someone created a Google document spreadsheet, listing then-recent Ethereum conference attendees’ coronavirus infections and potential exposure. Names were familiar to the community and enthusiasts, and included co-founder Vitalk Buterin as at least susceptible. At present, with lockdowns, arrests, fines in place, such a document appears foolish in retrospect.

Ethereum Conference Lessons

However, at the time, much of the Ethereum community lauded the effort as perhaps an extension of the open-source ethos, of transparency, and so on. The reaction to it probably depended on if a person wanted her name made public and cataloged in a semi-permanent way, but, in truth, most the names were derived from online public sources and evidence provided by the infected themselves.

Hey, I have the virus. I was here, doing this. If you were around me, get checked. That formula is responsible, thoughtful even. Consent, an overt, clear yes when it comes to personal information being gathered and eventually used in any public fashion is the minimum standard for Bitcoiners and privacy hawks alike (again, often the same people).

Edward Snowden falls into that camp, and by a lot. “Apple and Google intend to push pandemic trackers into most of the world’s smartphones,” he tweeted recently. “In response, @ACLU just published a whitepaper.” It’s titled, Principles for Technology-Assisted Contact-Tracing, and was authored by the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project’s senior staff technologist, Daniel Kahn Gillmor.

Voluntariness, Use Limitations, Minimization, Data Destruction, Transparency, No Mission Creep

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been a leading advocacy group in the United States for about a century. In a tidy 11 pages, Gillmor outlines a half dozen principles by which all such efforts should abide: Voluntariness, Use Limitations, Minimization, Data Destruction, Transparency, No Mission Creep.

“Whenever possible,” Gillmore writes, “a person testing positive must consent to any data sharing by the app. The decision to use a tracking app should be voluntary and uncoerced. Installation, use, or reporting must not be a precondition for returning to work or school, for example.” As for use limitations, “data should not be used for purposes other than public health — not for advertising and especially not for any punitive or law enforcement purposes.”

The ACLU also stressed “only necessary information is collected and to prohibit any data sharing with anyone outside of the public health effort,” and that “technology and related policies and procedures should ensure deletion of data when there is no longer a need to hold it.” The principle of transparency is included along with ensuring “tracking does not outlive the effort against COVID-19.”

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