Governments Haven’t Shown Location Surveillance Would Help Contain Covid-19

eff.org

36 points·panarky··6 comments

> those measures must be scientifically rigorous, and based on the expertise of public health professionals.

This claim ("must be scientifically rigorous") isn't backed up by any further argument in the article, and I think that it's required to take the rest of the piece seriously. How could anybody make a scientific statement about the efficacy of mass surveillance? It's not possible to do a randomised control trial, and as far as I know the only data point we have is China.

You could trial it in a smaller community before rolling it out nationwide, is what I can think of off the top of my head.

I think that's a reasonable thing to do under normal circumstances. There are currently 27k confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the USA, and I expect that to double or more in the next 5 days (increase in infected, wider testing), so I don't think a small pilot is a reasonable thing to do under current circumstances.

seeing as how the pandemic started and spread disastrously in one of the most authoritarian and highly surveilled states on the planet, it's hard to see these measures as anything other than attempt to further whittle away at the bill of rights while everyone is looking in the other direction. are we willing to give up habeas corpus and any semblance of a private life indefinitely if this turns into a seasonal illness?

The Israelis recently passed an emergency law for tracking everyone with even suspected covid-19 infection:

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/818327945/israel-begins-track...

We’ll see how it works out. Imagine trying this in the US?

So it makes sense to have these systems sunset in a year.

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