Privacy vs. the Coronavirus

Everywhere and at all at once rules around privacy are being relaxed in the face of urgent public health concerns:

As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus — even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale.

As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets

Meanwhile, global data privacy regulators are confident that “data protection requirements will not stop the critical sharing of information to support efforts to tackle this global pandemic.”

In the hierarchy of human needs, security always has and always will come first.