The Last Chance to Protect Our Privacy Amid Coronavirus Crisis

As the coronavirus continues to send the entire nations into a lockdown, governments are building the basis for a new society of total surveillance. Can we stop the global pandemic without sacrificing our freedom? We suppose it is possible, but the technology we roll out today should keep privacy, not destroy it due to global coronavirus panic.

Suspending fundamental rights during a crisis may appear feasible, but declaring endless state of emergency eventually brings about new forms of fascism. Starting with the censorship of doctors during COVID-19 outbreak in China and ending with the ridiculous lack of readiness for a pandemic coming to the United States, it is actually the government’s lack of preparation over the years that has worsened the catastrophe.

When governments take emergency powers, they never give them up. Under the guise of monitoring and tracking the spread of the disease, government mass surveillance through mobile phone tracking risks becoming normal. Algorithmic bias now goes beyond academic studies as opaque algorithms now can and will decide who can travel and work in places like China, and will no doubt soon decide who lives and who dies from the coronavirus. Is this the world we want to pass to our children?

The window for implementing technology to protect privacy is drawing to a close. More than ever, we need technologies developed by the collective intelligence of people to take control over the coronavirus crisis without giving up our privacy and finally our freedom.

Mass surveillance is only going to step us after coronavirus

Just as modern computer technologies evolved after World War II and the internet grew from the Cold War, the coronavirus can drive a new technological revolution. But rather than the biomedical revolution which is really necessary to stop COVID-19, we have seen a focus on tracking those infected, even though medical experts noted that it may be too late to be effective in Europe and the U.S.

In China, public surveillance is not a surprise, but experts think that the virus has given the government more levers to pull, as citizens install self-monitoring apps for their own good. Facial recognition technology is being used to detect heightened temperatures or raise concerns about people without protective masks — and there’s no evidence that this technology will pass when, or if, the pandemic does.

Iran has taken advantage of the crisis by attempting to make its citizens to install spyware on their phones that directly reported their location to the government. In Israel, authorities have gone even further, announcing that the General Security Service — the country’s domestic intelligence agency — will track Israelis who contract the virus via their mobile phone data, which stands for “one of the most comprehensive national surveillance exercises anywhere in the world.”

Similarly to how 9/11 caused the legalization of the tracking of civilian data by the National Security Agency, coronavirus has become an all-too-convenient post-terrorism excuse for expanding surveillance in the United States, including via cooperation with Google, Microsoft, IBM and others.

While everyone is concerned about the coronavirus, the U.S. government is attempting to make the mass tracking of messages mandatory with backdooring the end-to-end encryption on client devices by sneaking the EARN IT act through Congress. Some journalists beileve that breaking encryption is even necessary to stop the spread of incorrect information about the coronavirus, despite the fact that most mainstream press in the United States considered “the coronavirus is less dangerous than the flu” just a few weeks ago.

Technology can save us, but without Big Brother

We appear to be damned if we don’t collect the data needed to stop the pandemic, and damned if we develop a massive surveillance system to do so. What can we do about it?

There is a way out of this endless loop — we have to use privacy-focused technology. For more than two decades, cryptographers, lawyers and activists have been supporting decentralized and privacy-centric technologies which give us possibilites of collecting personal data but keeping it private.

Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland of MIT said: “We want answers, not data.” When will the coronavirus reach its climax? Will my friends or family contract the virus? How can we save the most lives? This needs loads of data, but this data can be protected with tools from distributed computing, cryptography and even blockchain technology.

Unfortunately, there is almost no funding for privacy-enhancing technology from the public sector, just like the funding for a coronavirus pandemic response. Venture capital in Silicon Valley has not really stepped up yet to fund privacy-centric startups. After all, it is much easier to turn profits by just collecting the data without any concerns about civil liberties.

There are reasons to hope for better. Techniques such as differential privacy which add “noise” to data and obscure identity in a database — already have been demonstrated by Apple, Google and others.

The government of Singapore presented a good example: The TraceTogether app for contact tracing keeps sensitive data on the user’s device, but it does not attempt to gather it from cell phone carriers.

Yet buliding privacy-centered technology is just more expensive, as it is also more expensive to build bridges that don’t collapse or develop coronavirus tests which really work.

Stopping surveillance by empowering people

Now we have to unleash our instinct for human solidarity and mutual aid which can actually take care of COVID-19. Everything from designs to parts of low-cost, open-source respirators to 3D-printed face masks that are already in production are signs of what can be done, and the race for a vaccine continues.

Similar to how Bitcoin (BTC) solves hash puzzles, one inspiring idea is Folding@home’s plan to use computational cycles of home computer users to simulate “potentially druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV2” in order to find a cure.

We think that such “people power”-based solutions can be applied for stopping mass surveillance. Rather than mining like Bitcoin, Nym uses computational cycles of volunteers from all over the world to mix users’ internet packets with those of other people — so their traffic may be anonymous in the crowd. Called a mixnet, this kind of design can protect privacy even against adversaries as powerful as the NSA that can watch the entire network, unlike Tor and VPNs.

As remote work during the quarantine is exposing companies to significant information security risk, more and more of us are using VPNs at home. However, VPNs only encrypt traffic to another computer and do nothing to prevent mass surveillance, as a VPN just puts all user trust in another computer which can easily hand user data over to the government. In order to prevent such situations, we propose leveraging blockchain technology to coordinate a decentralized and global network to prevent mass surveillance and ensure free speech and civil liberties.

Even the Roman empire collapsed under heavy plagues, and the coronavirus may bring the end to the post-Soviet neoliberal world order. If there’s any chance of getting out of this alive, it is not because our governments saved us with mass surveillance — it’s because we saved ourselves with the internet-enabled collective intelligence of humanity. Supporting privacy-centered technology gives us that chance, without responding to coronavirus like it is a dress rehearsal for making Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four a reality.