We’re Sleepwalking Into a World of Mass Surveillance
We’re Sleepwalking Into a World of Mass Surveillance
Seth Lazar
Barron’s Magazine
Contact-tracing apps like COVIDSafe could potentially be beneficial to public health authorities, but they also have privacy risks. How should those risks be managed? Many privacy advocates have argued for giving priority to individual, specific, informed consent. This is despite a tidal wave of research over the last two decades questioning the value of privacy self-management in the age of big data. The kinds of power created by mass mutual surveillance cannot be legitimated by individual consent, but must be justified through an appropriate democratic process. Tech companies. that develop new protocols for contact tracing apps—and decide what can and can't be known by governments—might be acting with the best of intentions, and following the moral reasons that apply to them. But without democratic accountability their dictates can never be legitimate.