The government is tracking your cellphone. And instead of being horrified at the spectre of a surveillance state, many people are happy about it because the invasion of privacy is arguably necessary and potentially lifesaving.
The data is used to track the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of efforts to "flatten the curve".
But, before you panic, this does not involve individual data, but so-called metadata. It’s anonymous, aggregated data that the SA cellular operators will give the government.
"It is important to look at the individuals affected in order to be able to help the department of health to say that we know, in a particular area we have so many people that have been infected," communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams said last week. "The industry collectively has agreed to provide data analytics services in order to help government achieve this."
Such surveillance is generally chilling and scary, and cause for concern. But in this age of the world’s fastest-spreading pandemic, tracking people is a tool — before the herd immunity principle takes effect and enough people have caught it and recovered to lift the community’s overall immunity.
Amid the personal and social horror, we are taking part in an amazing scientific experiment. Never before in history have we been able to track something like this. And it could be in real time, given the data at hand.
Some are worried that we won’t be able to roll back these incursions into our privacy
In a way, this might be the real precursor to a time when the Internet of Things is an everyday reality, with sensors in our homes, online security cameras and autonomous cars providing a live feed of data about the planet.
In science fiction, this kind of constant surveillance is usually considered a bad thing. No more iconic a book than George Orwell’s 1984 imagined how it could be taken to Stalinesque extremes.
And that is the worry now. SA’s approach seems benign and is enabled only because a state of disaster was declared. It follows the anonymised and aggregated data approach used in Europe.
Other countries have used seemingly more draconian approaches. In South Korea, phones are being tracked and displayed in a publicly available database. Anyone can access it to check if they might have encountered a Covid-19 carrier. Taiwan is rolling out an "electronic fence" mobile service to check that quarantined people are not moving about. Israel’s domestic spy agency will track the phones of Covid-19 patients to ensure they’re quarantining properly.
This is alarming for libertarians and others worried that we won’t be able to roll back these incursions into our privacy.
As much as doctors are triaging patients, governments are triaging constitutions as they seek to mitigate the pandemic’s effects. It’s an ethical debate that will rage for as long as we’re fighting this invisible enemy.
- Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine (stuff.co.za)
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