The world is facing an unprecedented pandemic, demanding responsible behaviour from people and preventive measures from governments.
In India, the lockdown introduced on March 24 saw four phases, resulting in a jolted economy, with over millions losing their jobs and a substantial GDP drop.
With no vaccine or cure in sight, the country has moved into an unlocking phase where the authorities have started relaxing the pandemic mitigation measures.
Digital solutions like dashboards, contact-tracing apps and data analytics models are being used to better predict and control the infection spread. EdTech tools for remote learning, ICT tools that enable remote working, and many others have gained wide adoption. However, trust, which is crucial in adopting such technologies, is seen fading from people’s minds due to the new ways of surveillance.
Be it the orders for home quarantined people to send time-stamped geolocated selfies every hour, threatening legal charges against defaulters, de-facto mandate to download contact tracing apps, or managers monitoring employees stringently through attention-tracking tools—the nation is moving towards a surveillance regime. One state has even mandated salon owners to collect Aadhaar numbers, name, address and mobile numbers of customers just for a haircut. With a range of digital technologies bolstering under-the-skin surveillance, the country is increasingly becoming a panoptic society. With such a society comes a variety of issues related to security, lack of trust, and loss of privacy.
Digital dashboards and contact tracing apps acquire data from users through self-reporting. They collect way more privacy-intrusive information than required, like location, profession, etc., violating the core privacy principle of data minimisation. These tools depend on the self-disclosure of accurate personal and health information by the citizens, which are aggregated for the data reporting of the pandemic and to take necessary measures. Allaying privacy concerns is crucial for accurate self-disclosures.
With hordes of data gushing into digital systems, privacy concerns are centred around how much control users have over their data, which parties have access to it, to whom it is disclosed (confidentiality) and how it is used (transparency). Mandating privacy-intrusive measures and irresponsible handling of the user’s personal and health data without clear guidelines can be detrimental to the user’s trust in these applications. Recalling the initial phases of lockdown, a list of home quarantined citizens returning from foreign countries was published on a public website. Though the list excluded names, it had sufficient personal information to identify the individual. While this is a severe privacy concern in itself, there were several other ethical issues, contributing to the social stigma associated with it.
Lack of transparency on data storage, management, protection, and security as well as lack of corrective measures for compromised data elevates security concerns in the citizens’ minds. Will the apps be withdrawn after the pandemic, or would the data be used for secondary purposes? These are some of the fears. Loss of user’s trust may only lead to citizens withdrawing from accurate data disclosure, thus impacting the efficacy of these digital initiatives.
Adding to the existing woes are the new forms of inequities, marginalisation and denial of services due to the stark digital divide. Senior citizens, with higher chances of comorbidities, are not so tech-savvy, facing significant barriers in accessing digital services. Similarly, migrant workers and daily wage workers, for whom social distancing is a luxury, are more vulnerable to the disease. With low digital literacy and a lack of access to smartphones, they form a significant chunk of “digital have-nots.” Over-reliance on technology to provide healthcare assessment and services might lead to the exclusion of such segments due to the digital divide, thus portraying an incomplete and inaccurate picture.
Digital tools, social media and ICT play a key role in keeping the people informed about the pandemic. People rely on information from these digital platforms to decide on their post-lockdown lifestyle and movements. Access to accurate and timely information is crucial to fight the pandemic. People’s experience with the digital tools during the four-phased lockdown, and their perceptions about the efficacy and reliability of the tools influence how much they trust them and how accurately they disclose their personal information.
Completely open-sourcing the digital applications coupled with timely action on the vulnerabilities and feedback reported by experts can win the trust of the people to confide their personal information. Sharing completely de-identified pandemic data along with test results on the public domain will protect user privacy. Employing principles of privacy by design while developing new digital applications and focusing on data minimisation, transparency, and openness for existing applications are some ways to win back public trust.Techno-centric solutions in isolation cannot be a panacea in controlling the spread of the pandemic. Participation by citizens and multi-stakeholder engagement are essential for the effective functioning of these solutions.
Rajendra K Bandi
Professor of Information Systems at IIM Bangalore
(Sowmya Kini and Shubha Krishnamurthy, research scholars at IIM Bangalore, contributed to the article)