REVIEW - Europe At Crossroads On How To Reconcile COVID-19 Tracing With Privacy Protection

BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd April, 2020) A network of more than 130 researchers and experts announced on Wednesday that they would soon launch the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative (PEPP-PT), which is expected to help Europe swiftly curb the COVID-19 pandemic but also raises the issue of acceptable limits of data collection under strict EU privacy regulations.

The technology will perform large-scale contact tracing across European countries by acquiring data via smartphones, thus allowing health workers to determine the circle of contacts of an infected person and reach out to those potentially infected. The launch of the initiative is planned for April 7.

With the major confinement period now in full swing, most European governments want to stabilize and flatten the infection curve. Still, at the beginning or throughout May, European countries will have to ease confinement, which brings about fears of second peaks of infection, as was the case in 1918 with the Spanish flu pandemic.

Therefore, to contain very possible flare-ups, measures need to be taken once country-wide quarantines have managed to flatten the curve of the spread. Therefore, European governments are looking at Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong, to name but a few of the regions successful in limiting their number of cases.

For Singapore, the fight against COVID-19 does not about general containment but through the traceability of contaminated people and their subsequent isolation. The country is regularly cited as a model in its control of the spread of the virus.

Singapore was hit very early because of the city-state's large Chinese community and its links to continental China, but the government of Singapore was ready and answered rapidly by testing as many citizens as possible, closing their border and airport, and developing the TraceTogether app, which is now the model around the world for IT experts trying to use artificial intelligence in the fight against COVID-19.

"For 6 weeks, the number of cases recorded by Singapore was, in proportion to the populations in the two countries, much higher than those of Italy or France. But from March 10, the trends reversed. In France, as in other European countries, the number of infected patients has exploded. On March 23, French cases were already three times more numerous, per capita, than in Singapore. In contrast, in the city-state, the number of cases has remained limited, mainly due to 'imported' cases: residents traveling abroad or visitors from the rest of the world," Hubert Testard, a professor at SciencesPo and an analyst at Asialyst told Sputnik.

According to the professor, the city-state's handling of the epidemic is explained through four factors: high-level medical infrastructure, social cohesion and high trust in the government, top-notch communication, and the capacity to trace and isolate detected cases.

From the beginning, the government organized direct communication via the WhatsApp application, among other things, allowing the immediate indentification of clusters of the disease, which were then able to be acted on rapidly, says Testard.

"The release of a new smartphone application called TraceTogether has strongly strengthened the government's traceability system. Every single smartphone user is followed throughout the city, and the police checks by phone of people in quarantine respect the injunction. If not, they are heavily fined. This policy has enabled the government to leave shops and restaurants open, and the population is not confined," he added.

All Singaporeans agree on one thing: they were well-prepared because of the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis, in which Singapore was the fourth most affected after China, Hong Kong and Canada.

Tracing citizens through their smartphone was, until the COVID-19 pandemic, a no-go area in many European countries through their national legislation or parliamentary committees and watchdogs, but also at the European level, with the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is the European Union's privacy rulebook that severely restricts personal data processing, making it hard to use smartphone location data to fight COVID-19.

Some, however, are ready to embrace such methods.

"New communication technologies linked to the smartphone, which has penetrated more than 90% of the population, can help fight the pandemic," virologist Francois Dufrasne told Sputnik.

The Asia example � the situation in Singapore, South Korea and Japan � shows that new apps can be developed to trace individuals, which can help authorities organize specific confinements of groups that could be affected, the expert explained.

"The security forces can also control people in an instant, by asking them to show their latest control reference on their phone screen: green, yellow or red. But it means of course at the same time to have the millions of tests enabling to test the population regularly," Dufrasne continued.

University of Louvain's philosophy professor Michel Dupuis says that during the epidemic, the old criteria of privacy does not hold, as patients have both the right for treatment and responsibility not to infect everyone else.

"The decision to trace the population is an acceptable political decision in this exceptional circumstance, provided that it is open and transparent. The data must be anonymized, depersonalized and it is a completely usable tool. Freedom is put into perspective in the name of the common good. This, obviously, does not mean that we are entering a dictatorship," he told Sputnik.

Many, however, remain skeptical.

"First, I have doubts about the system: many senior citizens don't walk around with smartphones; they would not be integrated in the public participating with the App," Brussels Doctor P. Letroye told Sputnik.

As a doctor, the expert also opposes giving away any patient-identifiable information.

"This app might very well have repercussions later and remain activated somehow, after the coronavirus crisis. Going down to the street level is one step too many for me," the expert stipulated.

COVID-19 has already upended many things taken for granted, making people reevaluate previously upheld notions, such as the right to privacy. Whether the outbreak will lead to a sea change in the issue is hard to predict, but the opportunity for that is present.