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I sit down and look out of my window in my family flat in Madrid. The streets are completely empty, it’s sunny outside and I can spy on my neighbours on their balconies. Quite a few family members and friends have displayed symptoms of Covid-19 to varying degrees, an ominous reminder that today (3rd of April), Spain has surpassed Italy in the number of confirmed cases, placing it second only to the US. Madrid now accounts for about 30% of those cases, and the city’s largest ice-rink is currently being used as a morgue.
I have just spoken to my housemates from Durham. We’re a house of mostly international students, two of whom are from Hong Kong. They are back home, and although life is certainly not normal (as the threat of an impending lockdown becomes more likely due to imported cases), they aren’t nearly as worried as I am. They show me their electronic bracelets with a QR code on them, designed to track potential patients.
Why does it seem, at least on a surface level, that East Asian countries have handled the outbreak better? How have cities with the highest population densities in the world, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, boasted of such low infection rates in comparison to their European counterparts? While there are a number of factors that can be attributed to this, it is important to shed light on a crucial difference between the relationship of citizens, surveillance and the state.
The prominent South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han published a column in the Spanish newspaper El País recently, in which he stated that “In Asia, it could be argued that epidemics are not only fought by medical experts, but also big data specialists and computer scientists - this is a paradigm shift that Europe does not seem to grasp”.
Chul Han points to China’s extensive built-in facial recognition software used in over 200 million CCTV cameras, and how efficient this was in tracking the spread of the virus. In some train stations, infrared cameras measure the body temperature of commuters and notify nearby passengers if they have come into contact with an infected person. In Singapore, initial measures proved effective in controlling the outbreak. Surveillance cameras, investigation teams and even an app called TraceTogether (which records distance between users and the duration of the encounter - information which the users readily agree to disclosing) have called into question the invasiveness of the state. Chul Han argues that in Asia, even more liberal countries such as Japan or South Korea, have a strong cultural tradition of collectivism, which manifests itself in a higher trust in the government, and consequently, less reluctance when it comes to giving the state access to their private data.
This higher surveillance is not just characteristic of East Asian countries though. In late March, Israeli citizens were receiving text messages from its public health services that they were to self-isolate for two weeks because they had come into contact with someone infected with the coronavirus. This was part of a surveillance program that uses cell phone tracking run by the Shin-Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. Israeli citizens were not aware of this programme. Shortly after, multiple civil rights organizations expressed how the lack of transparency is detrimental to public trust, while other cybersecurity experts justify the governmental tracking of citizens’ GPS location pointing to the unprecedented circumstances.
The use of GPS tracking and using citizens’ data is highly controversial in Europe. However, even data privacy advocacy groups recognize the extraordinary situation we find ourselves in. Across the EU, despite strict GDPR guidelines, the European Commission has urged major telecoms carriers across Europe (such as Telefónica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telecom Italia) to share their mobile data to be able to track the spread of the virus more efficiently. However, the Commission claims that the data will be aggregated and anonymized, meaning that individuals’ movements will not be able to be tracked. Additionally, in Spain, some regions such as Catalonia and Madrid have launched their own apps to alleviate workload on regional coronavirus hotlines.
There is still a drastic difference in the way Europeans think about data privacy in comparison to some Asian countries, as Byung-Chul Han remarks. Professor Andrea Renda, Head of Global Governance, Regulation, Innovation at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) points out that privacy has been given the status of fundamental right in the EU, and that so far there is no cause for concern. However, it will largely depend on the types of agreements made between tech companies and individual governments.
What happens after COVID-19?
It can be argued that current governmental use of personal data is well-intentioned. However, this raises important questions about the future. How is this data going to be protected? Can we ensure that it is not abused by governments and private companies in the future? It seems that there is a trade-off to be made between data privacy and effective containment of the virus. However, as Renda remarks, if mass surveillance is implemented, the coronavirus will not have been the reason for it, but rather the excuse for it to develop.
Author: Victoria Verdesoto
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