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 back seat for a number of reasons that we'll 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

and the call centers,

who are enabled and ready

to respond to an outbreak.

But whether it's because of austerity

or bad government planning,

very few governments anywhere

...