Your wristband is tattling on you: Some schools, workplaces, sporting leagues and other organizations are handing out wearable gadgets to log people’s skin temperature, automatically log their contacts or otherwise try to detect early signs of the coronavirus or alert people to possible virus exposure. My colleague Natasha Singer writes that these wearable trackers could fill an important gap in pandemic safety, but they also normalize continuous surveillance that could outlast this moment.
Civil rights and privacy experts warn that the spread of such wearable continuous-monitoring devices could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic — ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies like Facebook and Google have instituted online. They also caution that some wearable sensors could enable employers, colleges or law enforcement agencies to reconstruct people’s locations or social networks, chilling their ability to meet and speak freely. And they say these data-mining risks could disproportionately affect certain workers or students, like undocumented immigrants or political activists.
“It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit in Manhattan. “Even worse, there’s nothing to stop police or ICE from requiring schools and employers to hand over this data.”
Executives at Kinexon and other companies that market the wearable trackers said in recent interviews that they had thought deeply about the novel data-mining risks and had taken steps to mitigate them.
The New York Times
Me: Just like in China – the State knows where you are and who you have contact with. Tough if that is a person on the “bad” list, it makes you bad too