What can you do to protect your privacy?

- All of us really want to help stop the spread of COVID but some of the technologies being used to fight the pandemic raise important questions about public health concerns versus individual privacy. So before engaging with a contact tracing app, it's important to understand how these apps work and how your data will be used. Before downloading a contact tracing app, I suggest you ask these five key questions. First, do you trust the entity collecting the data? This is probably the most important question to ask. Is this a company or government entity that you know will use the data to protect against the pandemic or is there a potential for the data to be used in another way such as to advertise to you or surveil your political beliefs or even your actions? Read a company's privacy policy but also look at their track record on privacy. Have they misused data in the past? For governments, it's harder to give visibility into how data will be used so it's important to think about whether the data collected will be anonymized, meaning the data can't be connected back to you. Second, will the data only be used for tracing COVID or can it be used for other purposes? Data may sometimes be used for purposes other than public health such as law enforcement, and that may last longer than COVID-19. At the moment of a pandemic or public threat such as a terrorist event, we're often more than happy to give all of our data to the government or any other entity to fight the public threat, but we need to be conscious of not sharing data that could be used against us when that threat subsides. Third, will the data be shared with any entity beyond the app creator? This is what happened for the protesters in Michigan that I mentioned. They had signed up for a voting app, but that data was shared with a government entity, unbeknownst to them, to track the spread of the virus. Fourth, does the app collect more data than necessary to track COVID spread? Ask yourself if the app is only collecting information from you and your device that it needs to do what it says. If the app is asking information it doesn't need to track COVID such as your race or your gender or your age, question whether or not you should provide that. And finally, can the data be destroyed after a certain period of time? Make sure that that app is not keeping your data longer than you expect it to and review the privacy policy to determine how long it's kept. Data collected for purposes of COVID should only be kept for the incubation period of COVID. That means likely no more than 30 days. If you keep these questions in mind, you'll be in a much better position to judge the apps you share data with, and make sure that you're protecting your privacy while helping combat the public health crisis.