Gus Hussain has dedicated his career to studying privacy and pushing tech companies to protect

users.

He's the executive director of Privacy International in London.

If you told him in January that he'd recommend voluntarily giving up some private information

to governments, he might not have believed you.

But when COVID-19 began to spread across the globe, he became obsessed with contact tracing.

Contact tracing got a lot of attention and energy in the early days of the pandemic.

But since then, it's taken a bit of a backseat for a number of reasons that will dig into.

Now, the focus is on face masks, social distance and quarantines.

But Gus?

Gus is still thinking about contact tracing.

It's probably one of the most important aspects of a pandemic response.

The fundamental being testing.

The ability to understand whether or not somebody does have the virus.

But once you've done that, the necessary next step is to identify everybody they've interacted

with.

Contact tracing isn't new by any stretch of the imagination.

It's been a pillar of infectious disease response for decades.

But back in March, there was a lot of debate about how we should trace contacts.

In one camp, the old tried and true human method pick up the phone and make some calls.

Whenever there's any type of outbreak, you should have the human infrastructure being

the people who are trained in the call centers who are enabled and ready to respond to an

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