A Tracing Partner We Should Trust?

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Fighting COVID-19 is going to take extraordinary public health resources, but it’s also going to take extraordinary public trust.   That was why S.T.O.P. was alarmed by two contract tracing partnerships announced this week. First, we learned from media reports that that the White House plans to use the controversial surveillance firm Palantir to aggregate Americans’ health data and help coordinate COVID-19 strategy. But the next revelation hit far closer to home, when Governor Cuomo announced that Michael Bloomberg, the one-time overseer of New York’s stop-and-frisk and anti-Muslim surveillance programs, would lead the state’s efforts.   Contact tracing is an indispensable tool for public health officials, but without legal safeguards, that same information can be weaponized by ICE or law enforcement. As I told WNYC earlier this week: “we all want to make sure that the epidemiologists get the data that they need, without giving a blank check to the government to track all of us.” Whether it’s Palantir’s partnership with ICE to deport undocumented Americans, or Bloomberg’s unrepentant support for police programs that targeted Muslim New Yorkers for their faith, these partnerships raise questions about who we’re entrusting with our health data. COVID-19 is a public health disaster, but if we don’t put privacy protections in place, our response may create a civil rights disaster.   With thanks, Albert Fox Cahn, Esq. Executive Director Our First Year Our Team Share Tweet Forward