Privacy in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analyzing the Impact of the Length of Data Privacy Law Existence on Variation in COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The rapid creation of contact tracing apps at the beginning of COVID-19 is unprecedented given that 109 countries adopted these apps in the span of just a few months. Governments turned to contact tracing apps to speed up the process of manual contact tracing, piloting a system that had never been used before. This was often presented as a solution to the pandemic, but these apps came with the innate drawback of collecting sensitive personal information. This data collection gave governments an opportunity to use contact tracing apps as a way to expand surveillance of their populations. There are many concerns that this surveillance will persist after the end of the pandemic, which poses a significant risk to privacy and civil liberties at large. In this thesis, I seek to understand how the length of time that a country has had a data privacy law impacts the implementation of its contact tracing app. I find that the duration of a data privacy law has no impact on a country’s contact tracing app implementation. Instead, country-specific factors play a role. I look at the cases of Australia and South Korea, as they both have had a data privacy law for a long period of time but implemented their contact tracing apps in very different ways. I argue that Australia’s previous mishandling of digital projects and South Korea’s experience with the 2015 MERS outbreak alongside the government’s skillful deployment of technology shaped how the two countries designed their contact tracing apps.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 8, 2022; May 27, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wolfe, Avalon |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Fukuyama, Francis |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University |
| Department | Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law |
Subjects
| Subject | contact tracing apps |
|---|---|
| Subject | data privacy |
| Subject | Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Wolfe, A. (2022). Privacy in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analyzing the Impact of the Length of Data Privacy Law Existence on Variation in COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/xd261ft7746
Collection
Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. (CDDRL)
View other items in this collection in SearchWorksContact information
- Contact
- avalonwolfe@alumni.stanford.edu
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...