An Early Evaluation of the Privacy Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

At the time of this writing in mid-2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has gripped the world and frustrated health experts. In the interest of “flattening the curve” of new cases, state and local government officials have implemented a variety of legal measures including stay-at-home orders, social distancing requirements, and mandates to wear masks in public. These legal responses to the pandemic have created both new sources of data about people and new avenues for accessing existing data that may have been difficult to access before the pandemic. This survey will address four common scenarios related to these data streams that these policies have fostered. The impact of these data streams on people’s privacy is just starting to be understood. The term “privacy” in this survey refers to an individual’s ability to control disclosure of her personally identifiable information. This survey explores some early answers to the question of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people’s privacy in the U.S context.

Keywords: privacy, COVID, data, Zoom, contact tracing