DATABASE DISPATCH
THE BIAS BEHIND CORONAVIRUS TECH
When Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson was in hospital with the coronavirus, his colleagues declared Covid-19 the “great leveller”. Minister Michael Gove said: “The fact that both the prime minister and the health secretary have contracted the virus is a reminder that the virus does not discriminate.”
Just two months later, that statement has really not aged well.
We now see from virus mortality rates that ethnic minorities and marginalised communities are disproportionately affected around the world. A UK report released this month found that people of Bangladeshi descent are twice as likely to die from the virus compared to white Brits. In Brazil, the mortality among Indigenous peoples is twice the rest of the wider population. As of April, African-Americans represented about one-third of the population in Louisiana but 70% of the state’s Covid-19 deaths.
As well as exposing the socioeconomic disadvantage of these groups, the data is noteworthy for what it means for surveillance and the use of tech as part of the pandemic response.
Put simply: if the virus disproportionately affects marginalised groups, technological fixes designed to curb its spread will also disproportionately target these same groups.
Nicol Turner Lee, a Brookings Institute fellow in the US, says there’s a risk that more data will be collected on communities of colour as part of virus control efforts. “These groups are being disproportionately represented in databases where [Artificial Intelligence] instruments are being deployed,” she told me over the phone. “It’s not the public health surveillance we’re concerned about. But what happens with the data that’s being collected in these sensitive cases?”
Turner Lee worries this data could be re-purposed by health insurance providers or law enforcement. A blog on Lawfare about the equity of contact-tracing points lays out how location data gathered by weather apps and games has in the past been sold to US immigration agencies.
Turner Lee: “We just have to continue to be careful that the outcome [of these technologies] does not create discrimination, nor preference for some individuals.”
By talking about “preference”, Turner Lee alludes to another issue: who coronavirus tech is built for. Although smartphone apps have emerged as the global standard for digital contact tracing, critics say this approach is out of touch with the reality of how many people use technology.
“Our research also found that marginalized groups, from migrant workers to unhoused people, don’t enjoy individualised and stable smartphone access – a key assumption baked into the design of most #COVID19 tracking apps,” Amos Toh, researcher at Human Rights Watch, said on Twitter.
Singapore’s foreign affairs minister Vivian Balakrishnan attributes the disappointing uptake of the city-state’s contact-tracing app to this issue. "Not everyone has a smartphone or a smartphone that works effectively enough to supply all the data that we need," he said in a press conference. As an alternative, he announced plans to distribute a wearable contact-tracing “token” – a device that deploys similar technology but is not reliant on users having their own smartphone.
Can tokens enable a contact-tracing system that can be more equally distributed? Get in touch and let me know what you think.
NEWS AND VIEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
FOUR COUNTRIES WHERE THE COURTS HAVE CURBED SURVEILLANCE
Many countries have moved fast to use emergency powers to create new data collection capabilities – all in the name of public health. But in some, the courts are now stepping in to assess whether the new rules have gone too far. Here are four examples:
🇮🇱 Israel’s Supreme Court has banned the country’s internal security service from using counter-terrorism style tracking on people who are potentially infected until new laws are passed. "The state’s choice to use its preventative security service for monitoring those who wish it no harm, without their consent, raises great difficulties and a suitable alternative... must be found," the court said.
🇸🇰 Slovakia’s Constitutional Court has suspended parts of a new law allowing state authorities to access data collected by telecom operators to carry out contact tracing. “Part of the suspended law … lacked necessary guarantees against potential misuse of processed personal data,” said the court chairman, Ivan Fiačan.
🇫🇷 France’s highest administrative court deemed the use of drones “an illegal infringement of privacy”, banning police from using them to monitor compliance with the lockdown.
🇧🇷 Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended a measure, signed by President Bolsonaro, which would have obliged telecoms companies to share user data including names, phone numbers and addresses with the national statistics agency to enable virus research.
WEEKLY WEB ROUNDUP
In mid-May, India announced that its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app would no longer be compulsory, as it had previously said. But digital rights group, the Internet Democracy Project, found a very different reality in places where the app is mandatory for employees, travellers crossing state borders, students and people living in virus hotpots.
IBM announced last week it was ending all work on facial recognition, as its CEO called out the technology’s bias after years of work from computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, among others. You can read their statement here. Amazon followed by introducing a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition software. With the technology already in use by governments around the world to enforce coronavirus lockdowns and verify identities in home quarantine apps, it remains to be seen how the backlash against facial recognition will also affect responses to Covid-19.
Digital ministers from five European states – Germany, Portugal, Spain, France and Italy – published an open letter on LinkedIn rallying against unnamed companies which have moved to limit how governments can use their phone operating systems to carry out contact tracing. “The use of digital technologies must be designed in a way that we, as democratically elected governments, evaluate and judge it both acceptable for our citizens and compliant with our European values,” wrote the ministers.
NEXT UP!
De Correspondent’s Dimitri Tokmetzis and I are currently working on a story about how governments and tech companies are clashing over contact-tracing apps. The story will be out soon. Until then, help us build our database tracking global surveillance measures introduced in response to Covid-19. See you next week!
Morgan Meaker
The Correspondent journalist, covering digital rights
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Every Monday, I share the latest on coronavirus surveillance from our global database of tech experts and journalists.