In recent days, vaccine passports have become the latest culture war flashpoint, as politicians transform a new slew of health tracking apps into the dividing line in the debate over how to recover from the pandemic. But in the rush to stake out partisan stances, both liberals and conservatives have taken positions on the apps that ignore the science, undermine public health and endanger privacy. In one extreme, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas issued a sweeping ban not just outlawing state-sponsored apps, but barring schools from requiring proof of vaccination, even via paper records.
Abbott’s overbroad order was a seeming response to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who launched the latest round of pandemic politics with his misguided Excelsior Pass, the first state-sponsored vaccine passport in the country. But at a moment when many are desperate for anything that will return us to normal life, Excelsior Pass’s shortcomings provide a rude wake-up call.
Vaccine passports can be uncontroversial in some instances. Updating the 1944 standard on the Carte Jaune, an official vaccination record created by the WHO and used for international travel, for the digital age raises few privacy risks. Same goes for proving vaccination for students returning to college, just as we require for many other vaccines. But the Excelsior Pass raises a very different type of privacy concern, and it’s not about health data.
For those worried about revealing their vaccine status, you’re out of luck; the government already knows. When I was able to get the COVID-19 vaccine, I completed a state registration form, telling New York State all the details. The privacy risk with vaccine passports is the potential for tracking something very different: your location.
Unlike vaccine registration for schools, where students would only have to prove their status once, vaccine passports could require us to use the apps constantly. The Excelsior Pass and other apps are being used at baseball games, concerts and performing arts venues, and that could be just the start. Vaccine passport developers want to use the technology to control access to everything from supermarkets to mass transit.
The apps create a new, inescapable layer of geolocation data tracking. This digital log maps out everything from where we protest to where we pray, with countless more mundane stops in between. That threat may seem minor to some, but it will be deeply chilling to those who fear retaliation for practicing their faith or giving voice to their beliefs.
But while the cost of these apps is clear, the benefits are murky. Vaccine passports purport to be secure, but the reality falls short of the promise. I was able to create a fake Excelsior Pass using public social media information in just 11 minutes. In my case, I had the user’s consent for the experiment, but hackers won’t be as scrupulous.
The sad truth is that there are no shortcuts out of this pandemic, no magic apps. The way we return to normal life is by doing what health officials have recommended from the start: promoting trust in the vaccine. Until we reach herd immunity, the vaccine passport apps will help politicians on both sides of the aisle get media attention and raise money, but they won’t keep Americans safe.
Albert Fox Cahn is executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at Yale Law School.