Can COVID-19 Protections Be Designed For Privacy?

As our society moves forward in a time of novel coronavirus we begin to improve the tools available to fight the virus. I wrote earlier about the many ways that tracking and fighting an epidemic conflict with attempts to protect personal privacy, but new attempts are being developed to maintain private data while implement more virus-fighting information tools.

Unsurprisingly, an early attempt at such a sophisticated tool has arisen in Europe. Der Spiegel reports that there "is a new European approach that is supposed to dispel fears of extensive monitoring by 'tracking apps'." This alternative to current disease and human tracking technologies will not be used against the will of identified individuals and will not allow others to identify infected people. Whether such privacy-reducing steps are necessary for effective tracking has yet to be determined, but creators of the new system want to try.