Abstract
With the advent of the pandemic (e.g., novel corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19)), a tremendous amount of data about individuals are collected by the health authorities on daily basis for curbing the disease’s spread. The individuals’ data collection/processing at a massive scale for community well-being with the help of digital solutions (e.g., mobile apps for mobility and proximity analysis, contact tracing through credit card usage history, facial recognition through cameras, and crowd analysis using cellular networks data etc.) raise several privacy concerns. Furthermore, the privacy concerns that are arising mainly due to the fine-grained data collection has hindered the response to tackle this pandemic in many countries. Hence, acquiring/handling individuals data with privacy protection has become a vibrant area of research in these pandemic times. This paper explains the shift in privacy paradigm due to the pandemic (e.g., COVID-19) which involves more and detailed data collection about individuals including locations and demographics. We explain technical factors due to which the people’s privacy is at higher risk in the COVID-19 time. In addition, we discuss privacy concerns in different epidemic control measures (ECMs) (e.g., contact tracing, quarantine monitoring, and symptoms reporting etc.) employed by the health authorities to tackle this disease. Further, we provide an insight on the data management in the ECMs with privacy protection. Finally, the future prospects of the research in this area tacking into account the emerging technologies are discussed. Through this brief article, we aim to provide insights about the vulnerability to user’s privacy in pandemic times, likely privacy issues in different ECMs adopted by most countries around the world, how to preserve user’s privacy effectively in all phases of the ECMs considering relevant data in loop, and conceptual foundations of ECMs to fight with future pandemics in a privacy preserving manner.
Highlights
Privacy is one of the fundamental human rights, and it is needed for individualism, self respect, and autonomy [1]
This paper explains the shift in privacy paradigm due to the pandemic (e.g., COVID19) which involves more and detailed data collection about individuals’ activities, locations, buying patterns, and mobility/trajectories etc
The main goals of the proposed research are to provide a compact review of the digital solutions employed by the health authorities to tackle the challenge of the COVID-19 and their privacy implications
Summary
Privacy is one of the fundamental human rights, and it is needed for individualism, self respect, and autonomy [1]. Owning to the unanticipated and on-going global challenge of a novel corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), all countries across the globe are continually exploring/implementing new digital solutions to cope with this disease in order to alleviate healthcare workers burden [7,8]. Reliance on such system has helped in curbing the spread of this disease. The privacy protection in epidemic control measures has become the conceptual foundations of futures research and digital healthcare solutions [13,14,15].
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