Evaluating Privacy During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency: The Case of Facial Recognition Technologies
Luis Felipe Miranda Ramos · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020
The present article aims to discuss how governments have turned to biometric technologies to fight the spread of COVID-19, mainly through the adoption of facial recognition technologies, and the risks to people’s privacy of inadequate measures to protect their personal data. We have identified seven systems from different countries (i.e., China, France, Israel, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, and Russia) that present some form of facial recognition during their operation and pointed out their functionalities and released information on safeguards for data protection. The data collected so far has shown that, in most countries, the necessary safeguards to protect people’s privacy and their personal data in the short-term and long-term, are not receiving sufficient considerations.