Is Contact Tracing a Privacy Threat?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2020
⏱️ 67 minutes
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Summary
Many people are holding out contact tracing as the way we are going to control the COVID-19 epidemic. Once we start opening up the economy again, it involves identifying people who have tested positive for the virus and notifying those with whom they have been in close contact that they are at risk and need to quarantine. It also involves surveillance—electronic surveillance of a type that we are not comfortable with as a society. Can we do it legally? Should we do it? Will it be effective? To work through the do's and don'ts and cans and can'ts of contact tracing, Benjamin Wittes spoke with Josh Sharfstein, Susan Landau, Alan Rozenshtein, Stewart Baker, and Bobby Chesney.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | Whenever you think about a situation where people are giving up private data and you have |
| 0:40.4 | an issue about security, which is the standard one, but here we have public health, the |
| 0:45.4 | first thing you have to think about is, is this solution efficacious? |
| 0:50.6 | I'm Benjamin Withers and this is the LawFair podcast April 18, 2020. |
| 0:57.8 | It's called contact tracing and many people are holding it out as the way we are going |
| 1:04.4 | to control the COVID-19 epidemic once we start opening up the economy again. |
| 1:11.9 | It involves identifying people who have tested positive for the virus and notifying those |
| 1:18.3 | who they have been in close contact with that they are at risk and need to quarantine. |
| 1:24.7 | And yes, it involves surveillance, electronic surveillance of a type that we are not comfortable |
| 1:31.4 | with as a society. |
| 1:33.8 | Can we do it legally? |
| 1:36.0 | Should we do it? |
| 1:37.3 | Will it be effective? |
| 1:38.9 | We've had a lot of writing on this question at LawFair and today we gathered a whole bunch |
| 1:45.0 | of people with diverse expertise on the subject. |
| 1:49.1 | Josh Sharfstein, former senior FDA official state health official in Maryland and city |
| 1:56.6 | official in Baltimore and currently a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School |
... |
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