The COVID-19 Pandemic One Year On: Finding Balance Between Privacy and Public Health

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements limited the possibility of safe and lawful in-person interactions for over a year. Many people in the United States responded to these circumstances by resisting challenges to their sense of decisional privacy – “non-interference in one's decisions and actions.” Instead, they chose to relinquish some data privacy by sharing both new and existing types of data about themselves in efforts to enjoy the simulacrum of human contact.Use of digital services that helped approximate in-person interactions increased dramatically. Video conferencing features in Zoom and dating apps, for example, collected new types of data about people and offered novel means by which information once exchanged primarily in person could be collected, processed, and stored. Privacy and data protection jurisprudence has helped address the circumstances where an individual’s privacy interests may have been compromised. An overview of the privacy litigation involving Zoom (Part II) provides an illustrative example of some of the privacy consequences of the pandemic.Many people have been very reluctant to share data in more collective efforts at fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Attempts at adding a digital layer to activities traditionally perceived to be data-light met strong resistance (Parts III and IV). Decisional privacy and data privacy are compromised when some combination of infection, vaccination, location, and demographic data are aggregated, processed, and shared. Discussions of the limited successes of tracking apps and policies related to the administration of COVID-19 vaccine show that privacy interests during the pandemic may have trumped public health concerns.