The Human Rights Challenges of Digital COVID-19 Surveillance.
Akarsh Venkatasubramanian · PubMed · 2020
Digital technologies offer huge potential to improve the accuracy, breadth, reliability, and speed of contact tracing and other public health surveillance measures. However, in the absence of appropriate global governance frameworks, the usage of digital technologies during health emergencies presents multidimensional challenges. The article by Sharifah Sekalala and colleagues in this issue analyzes the human rights implications of tools used for outbreak surveillance and suggests concrete recommendations to mitigate risks to human rights. This commentary discusses the technological and governance challenges associated with their recommendations. It incorporates a technological feasibility viewpoint into some of the recommendations and proposes one additional recommendation to strengthen the governance and accountability of technology developers, regulators, and evaluators. As Sekalala and colleagues note, several countries now use digital COVID-19 surveillance technologies for symptom tracking and contact tracing to enable rapid case identification and integration into public health databases. Most technologies use location or GPS services (for example, China's Health Code and Ghana's COVID-19 Tracker) or Bluetooth (for example, France's TousAntiCovid and Singapore's TraceTogether).