Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently announced the release of a nationwide contact tracing app. He remarked that it would be “something you can just download and forget about.”
In the wake of demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd, the Minneapolis Public Safety Commissioner stated that the police had begun tracking down protesters through a process he analogized to “contact tracing.” Whether or not contact tracing apps are or will be used to locate demonstrators, it is clear that the barrier between public health officers and police officers is permeable.
Blurring these lines is dangerous on multiple fronts. New surveillance technologies aimed at combating COVID-19 could be co-opted as a foothold to strengthen the surveillance state. In turn, skepticism of state-promoted contact tracing technologies may lead to insufficient adoption of them by the public, undermining their effectiveness and taking away a potentially important tool to fight the pandemic.
Legal precedents
This situation is not the first time that public health, privacy and law enforcement have collided. In the case of Vancouver Police Department vs. BC Centre for Excellence (BC-CfE) in HIV/AIDS, the Vancouver Police Department demanded private medical records from the BC-CfE in connection to an aggravated sexual assault case.
The implications of this request were massive. The BC-CfE has records on almost all known HIV-positive people in the province that include personal, demographic and even genetic information. Understandably, the BC-CfE resisted the request.
The B.C. provincial court held that society’s interest in protecting the confidentiality of the records outweighed the objectives of the police investigation as disclosure of patient and research information in furtherance of a criminal investigation would “erode the Centre’s ability to maintain a comprehensive program for HIV-Aids research and treatment. The benefits to society from that research are immeasurable.”