Open data on the COVID-19 pandemic: anonymisation as a technical solution for transparency, privacy, and data protection
Thiago Guimarães Moraes, Amanda Nunes Lopes Espiñeira Lemos, Alexandra Krastins Lopes, Camille Moura, José Renato Laranjeira de Pereira · International Data Privacy Law · 2021
This article aims to discuss transparency and privacy on COVID-19 public data. The Brazilian context was chosen as a case study to understand how to implement transparent COVID-19 government databases while respecting data protection. The article intends to answer the question: which technical approach could be implemented to publish transparent data on COVID-19 infections while respecting the privacy of individuals? Privacy by Design is brought as a key concept to harmonization between these topics. It is possible to conclude that while transparency databases are essential when facing a pandemic outbreak, they must respect the rights to privacy and data protection. We present anonymization as a set of four strategies which aims to provide unlinkability to a given dataset: (i) to minimize, (ii) to separate, (iii) to abstract, and (iv) to obfuscate. While anonymization is a technical solution that may help to bring balance between open data transparency and privacy, it needs to be complemented by organizational measures, such as access control, privacy policies, and data protection impact assessments. The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted personal data mining. Various experiences in fighting the new coronavirus focus strictly on extensive data processing concerning not only health conditions, but also behaviours and relationships, allegedly to try to control the spread of the virus at any cost. Several approaches have been put forward by different government. In China, the government has been widely using body temperature, geolocation and user behaviour data to monitor the spread of the infection and commitment to quarantine, and scientists in the USA are processing global scale data to find vaccines for the virus.1 Stakeholders in Brazil have been trying to follow similar approaches.2 This vast data processing raises concerns on uses for secondary purposes that citizens might be unaware of,3 such as the use for surveillance activities,4 which may involve intrusive tools implemented by governments.5 For instance, InLoco, a Brazilian company involved with the use of geolocation for contact tracing, allegedly processes only anonymized data pursuant to the Brazilian Data Protection Legislation, ‘Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados’—LGPD.6 Although it claims to implement anonymization techniques in its privacy policy,7 the lack of a proper audit and more detailed information on the methodology for anonymizing data raise some eyebrows.8 At the same time, the role of ensuring access to public information while protecting personal data can prove to be rather challenging. In the Brazilian Access to Information Law, ‘Lei de Acesso à Informação’ (LAI), access to personal data is restricted to public authorities, as provided by law, and the data subject.9 Although this rule aims to provide balance between transparency and privacy, it may tip to one side or the other if not properly implemented, which may lead to one of the following scenarios:10 (i) the denial of requests of access to information due to alleged secrecy without further explanation;11 or (ii) the inadequate exposure of citizen personal data, supposedly to promote transparency, which can be even more sensitive in the context of public health. raise the of which technical approaches be implemented to publish transparent data on COVID-19 infections while respecting the privacy of In this that the answer to this with the concept of Privacy by Design which may be implemented different one of is a set of techniques by which data is in such a that the data is to of information to data are not personal data, and the of data protection such as anonymization techniques is a for data more data when that health information is sensitive data. 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