Week 5: Data Privacy.
This week, my class has been asked to contemplate data privacy. If you have not read it already, take a look at the New York Times’ The Privacy Project. This project describes very well why data privacy matters, the scope of personal data collected on individuals, how it can be used, and how to be safer with your own technology.
I think most young people have a good understanding that when you buy a smart phone and carry it around, it’s collecting data on you. I looked at this a bit in my post on the quantified self. Our phones track information that they share with us (steps, screen time, etc.), but they also collect data that they keep for themselves – or in some cases, sell. Most notably, GPS data.
In reading this New York Times series, I began to think about how this data might be used to track the Coronavirus and what that would mean for Americans. This is happening in other countries and is in talks for the US, although we don’t know much about the efficacy of using phone data to track social distancing and contamination. The Washington Post claims that “the U.S. government is in talks with Facebook, Google, and other tech companies about using anonymous location data,” but anonymous location data is easily un-anonymized. The New York Times Privacy Project describes this in detail, but I’ll explain it quickly here too in case you don’t have time for that.
Let’s say I’m looking at your phone data. I might pull all of the records that are labeled with your anonymized ID and be able to see your day to day movement. In a simple case, you sleep in the same house every night and work in the same office every day. A few Google searches and I could find your name. This data is not really anonymous.
That’s the first problem.
Now, here’s why I don’t think cell phone data should be used to track things like social distancing or possible contamination.
GPS data on the average smart phone is only accurate up to about 16 feet. This is why your Uber parks down the block to pick you up. It’s not their fault. Cut them some slack. While this is remarkable for using softwares like Google Maps, it’s not so good when your social distancing radius is six feet. If you’re within six feet of another person, a GPS does not know if you’re two feet away or ten. It’s also hard to tell if you’re on the same floor as someone else or not. GPS is even worse with vertical placement than with horizontal. It might appear that you’re giving a piggyback ride to your boss, when in fact she’s two floors above you. And God forbid you forget your phone in the bathroom. Now the government thinks you are sharing a stall with your co-worker.
But Juliet, you might say, every American is quarantining at home. No one is with their boss and their co-workers.
To which I would reply, you are wrong. Just ask my sister who FaceTimes me every day to show me the congregations of people drinking coffee below her Nashville apartment.
But let’s pretend that you’re right and all Americans are practicing strict social distancing and only going to stores when essential. Still, the 16 foot radius causes us an issue. And with regards to spreading infection, this could cause unnecessary panic. What if two people are next to each other at a stoplight in separate cars? Would we count them as potentially infected? Or maybe your Instacart delivery person drops your groceries at your door while you spy from the window. Are they sent some sort of message telling them to get tested for the virus? Not to mention the issue of noncompliance – what if you leave your phone at home and go to a party?
Sure, there are potential upsides to using cell phone location tracking. We can look at patterns of movement, see where people congregate, observe migrations in and out of hot spots, etc.. But the government could also attempt to use anonymous data to do things like enforce curfews, track social distancing, or even use identifiable metadata about your texts and phone calls to predict who you’re contacting and find out who you have been with. And not to sound too patriotic, but would this not be a violation of our fourth amendment rights?
In the Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, the court decided it was, calling cell phone location data a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years.” Police need a warrant to get these records. I suppose this could be deemed within the interest of national security, but I am no constitutional expert and I’m quickly veering out of my domain.
My point is, while there are ways to make GPS tracking more accurate, I don’t think this would work particularly well and I don’t think it’s worth the potential panic it could cause.
If you’re concerned about your data privacy, take a look again at the New York Times Privacy Project (for which this blog post is quickly becoming an unpaid advertisement).
This is the fourth in a series of posts From Quarantine. Most posts from quarantine are prompted by Aisling Quigley’s Data Storytelling class at Macalester College. This is one of those posts.