As other countries implement covid-19 tracing apps, the EU mulls where to draw the line between safety and surveillance
officials and politicians preach that only their privacy laws can lead to salvation. Holy texts, such as the General Data Protection Regulation or the ePrivacy Directive, are held up as wisdom the whole world would be better off following. Such is the regulatory clout of Brussels that much of it often does. Those who break such strictures are smitten . In an age of coronavirus, as policymakers ponder ways of ending the lockdown, this belief is being tested.
A crisis of faith has taken root among once-true believers. “It is a trade-off,” warned Austria’s right-wing chancellor, Sebastian Kurz. “What is more important to us? Data protection or that people can return to normal? Data protection or saving lives?” Even German politicians, hitherto the high priests of the faithful, have joined in. Jens Spahn, the German health minister, suggested tracking people’s phones in order to contain the virus, before backing down after an outcry.
Countries full of privacy heathens have enthusiastically put the state’s surveillance capacity to use. In Hong Kong, new arrivals can be required to wear a tracking bracelet. Israel has enlisted its intelligence agencies to track people who may have the virus. In South Korea officials root through everything from taxi receipts to credit-card records to hunt for those infected. Now theWhether Europe veers from its righteous path is a political question, rather than a legal one.
It is Europe’s citizens, not its lawyers, who will decide how much intrusion they are willing to bear. Most European governments are toying with tracing apps, where smartphones would tell users whether they interacted with someone who had covid-19. But such apps work well only when large proportions of the population download them. No matter how technically ingenious a solution may appear, it is little use without mass consent. Other governments have gone further.
’s place in the world even before covid-19 devastated the bloc’s economy and left nearly 100,000 of its citizens dead, with doubtless much more disaster still to come. If other systems of governance, whether outright autocracy or “managed” democracy, are seen to handle the virus better, it could push them into a crisis of confidence. Their lofty ambitions on privacy could well be jettisoned in such circumstances.
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