Hello. I'm Katrien Devolder. This is thinking out loud conversations with leading philosophers from around the world on topics that concern us all.
This is a special edition on ethical questions raised by the Corona pandemic.
So this time, we'll will be talking to philosopher Carissa Veliz, from the University of Oxford.
In her book Privacy's Power,
she exposes how our personal data is giving too much power to big tech and governments and why that matters and what we can do about it.
So she seems like the right person to talk about the use of contact tracing apps in our fight against a corona virus pandemic.
There are different types of app and they can be centralised or decentralised,
but they all aim to let people know if they have been in close contact with someone who has COVID 19.
If so, and they should get a test and self isolate. So let's find out why these apps may pose a threat to our privacy.
So some people are worried about these apps, especially because they may threaten our privacy.
Do you think that such threats to privacy are real? Should we be worried about privacy when we use such apps?
It's definitely a consideration. One of the problems that many apps have had, including, for instance,
the one used in Qatar and the one used in India, is that they're very easy to hack.
Location data is incredibly sensitive through location data.
You can know where somebody lives, where they work, who they sleep with, whether they go to a hospital.
You can infer whether they do drugs, all kinds of sensitive information. And this is particularly sensitive in the context of a disease that can kill.
So if you can hack people and figure out or try to figure out who might have infected the loved ones,
who might have died from the disease, it can be very, very sensitive. So that's one concern.
The possibility of a hack. Another concern is if you have a centralised database with all these connexions between people.
That's, again, very sensitive information. It not only tells you where people live and work and so on, all all about location data,
but also their networks, their connexion networks and network networks of people around them.
So you can know whether journalists met with a source, whether a lawyer met with a client, a doctor with a patient and so on.
And again, this is very sensitive, especially in the wrong hands.
So if we think about government might be untrustworthy, then it's a really big worry.
And so I think many people don't really care about these privacy threats because I think they have
nothing to hide and that privacy is only an issue for celebrities or politicians or journalists maybe,
or criminals. So are they making a mistake then? I mean, should it matter to them too? Yes, they're making various mistakes?
One mistake is that they do have something to hide and something to fear.
So in a recent survey that I did with a colleague,
we found out that about 92 percent of people have had some kind of bad experience related to privacy online.
So eventually, if you're not careful with your privacy, you're going to get hacked.
You're going to get your credit card number stolen. You're going to be exposed in some way.
You're going to be publicly humiliated. This happens to normal people who are not lawyers.
and not journalists. Nobody special. So on the one hand, yes, you do have something to fear for yourself.
And then the second kind of mistake is that you should take care of your privacy for other people as well for for society in general.
Why don't we don't protect our privacy? We leave our democracy at risk.
So an excellent example is Cambridge Analytica.
it's like a textbook example of how knowledge is power and privacy is related to power in that way,
because the more people know about you, the more they can hack you in a way or they more the more they can exploit your your vulnerabilities.
So what happened in Cambridge, Analytica,
was that they exploited people's psychology to build this psychological warfare tool that they could use on any voter to try to sway elections.
And that affected us all. It affected the people in the United Kingdom who are being affected through Brexit,
but also European people who are also affected by Brexit and Americans who are affected by the Trump elections.
And anybody who is touched by world politics. And that's pretty much everybody gets affected.
One could say, well, privacy is importance, but this is a pandemic.
I mean, shouldn't we risk our privacy?
And if this can save many lives. Of course, we should consider it very seriously, but we shouldn't be uncritical.
There is this phenomenon that's very common in crises in which we're you know, we really want to get out of it as soon as possible.
People are dying. It's really extreme. And the temptation is to say, yes, let's do whatever it takes, no matter what.
And to assume that that's going to work. Actually, there are many questions about that.
The first thing to notice is that, of course, a contact tracing app works on a phone if you don't have a phone.
It doesn't work. Many people who don't have a phone or who don't carry their phone around all the time.
But let's suppose that everybody has a phone and everybody carries it around. Even then, you have at least two problems.
False positives and false negative. So suppose you meet someone down the street and it's a friend and you haven't seen each other in a while.
And so you give each other a hug and a kiss and you're not in contact for more than 15 minutes.
So the app and doesn't recorded as a contact. But actually, you were close enough that there was a contagion there.
They wouldn't be able to notice it and so it would be a case of a false negative.
You would feel safe because you're upset as you. Absolutely fine. And in fact, you're not.
And then there's a case of false positives. One case would be a case in which you are very close to another person, maybe in the same floor,
but in different rooms or in different floors, being in the same building. And because you're separated by a wall, there was never a risk.
But your app will record that as a contact.
Perhaps one could say, well, many of us already give up much of our privacy through the Internet, especially through the use of apps and social media.
So perhaps using a track and trace app only adds a small additional risk to the risk we already take.
So if that's true, the benefits of using yet can more easily outweigh the small additional risk that comes with it.
So doesn't that provide sort of a good reason to use the app as long as we're going to keep being reckless with privacy online anyway?
Well, again, it depends on the app. So if there's an app that's, you know, really well tested, and it looks very secure and decentralised.
Then maybe the answer is yes, if it's a centralised app, probably not because that kind of data is very sensitive.
So even though you give it up in other ways, it's harder to aggregated in the same way.
Furthermore, this is data that will end up in the hands of governments and even though we give a lot of data to corporations and we shouldn't.
And many times governments get a copy of that data.
There is a lot of leeway for abuse and governments can force people to do things that corporations typically can't.
They have a different kind of power relations with citizens. And that is a further risk.
And what do you think about the argument that sort of the track and trace apps are actually much less intrusive than measures we already accept?
So some people say, well, if we accept, you know, lock down, social distancing and so on.
Shouldn't we also accept the track and trace apps even if there is this potential harm?
I mean, there are many considerations to take into account there.
One is that, you know, it's a slippery slope.
It's like, OK, it's you know, if we accept this and we should accept anything that just leads us to to a very unreliable place.
Secondly, again, it matters a lot how effective something is.
So social distancing, is directly effective, in avoiding contagion in a way that the app is not.
And so it makes a huge difference. And furthermore, there is this danger about privacy because.
In other kinds of cases, when you give something up, the consequence is very direct and very probable.
So when you isolate in your home, it's very direct why it's bad for you and how much you missing people and the opportunities that you're missing,
both professionally and personally. It's very tangible. It's very clear.
It's it's very fast. Privacy doesn't work like that.
So you give up your privacy and you don't feel anything. You don't bleed.
It's not hard to grieve. You know, your skin is not broken.
There isn't a palpable feeling. I mean, I'm down the line maybe two months down the line, maybe one year, a month down the line.
Your identity gets stolen. You get your money stolen or you end up with a government that abuses its power and suddenly you.
Or you could get discriminated against by a company.
Is it conceivable to have an app that is not so dangerous or should we just not use any track and trace app at all?
It's conceivable, although the way to do it is first you put all the physical conditions in place that are necessary for the app to work.
So first you have to have a good programme of mass testing and track and trace, because even if you have an app,
you need manual track and trace, because that kind of information that you can't get from an app.
So, you know, on manual track and trace programme, will figure out whether two people met were in a park or in an inside place, no windows.
And that kind of information makes a huge difference. So once you have all the physical requirements in place, then you design an app that's super secure.
You go to privacy experts, you talk to them, you ask for their advice, you make them tested.
You go to the computer scientist, you've tried to challenge them to hack it
And, you know, people want to save lives. Nobody wants to be in this situation. This is horrendous.
So experts will collaborate and they have collaborated.
So once you get the green light or people who say, yes, you know, I've tested this app and I couldn't break into it.
And once, you know, a privacy expert says, you know, I've looked at this app and it's absolutely as solid as can be.
Then people will get behind it. But if you do it, you know, in this disorganised fashion, you don't inform people.
You don't give reasons. You design an app that is so faulty that, you know, everybody can see that it's leaking everywhere and then it's gonna be a mess.
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