Privacy, security, and public health in a pandemic year

How can European companies best prevent measures intended to control the COVID-19 pandemic from also undermining data privacy and security?

 
As the coronavirus pandemic takes its terrible toll, in both human life and livelihoods, governments, public-health authorities, companies, and individuals have responded with extraordinary measures. To protect the health of people, governments and institutions put in place restrictions on movement and mechanisms for health tracking and reporting. These mechanisms, including contact-tracing and self-reporting apps, some recording and transmitting personal health information, underscore the deepening importance of data protection and privacy in this crisis.

With the advent of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 and the possible “ePrivacy Regulation,” companies and institutions have increased their data awareness. These new regulations enforce stricter rules on privacy and data protection, setting new standards, in the words of the GDPR, for the “rights and freedoms of data subjects” around the globe. During the pandemic, government authorities and companies have had to balance two priorities—protecting public health and protecting personal privacy. Some measures designed to limit the spread of the virus and potentially save lives could also have serious human-rights implications.

While many public-health measures do not require data collection, others could encroach upon the protections that protect individuals’ personal data. Government officials and companies can find themselves on the horns of a dilemma, so to speak, contemplating measures to reduce the spread of the virus that could meanwhile drastically curtail the rights and freedoms of the people whose lives they seek to protect. The following discussion draws on the recent European experience of this public health–personal privacy dilemma. Events continue to move quickly, and our analysis reflects experience at a particular point in time (May 2020) in the history of the pandemic.

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Πηγή: mckinsey