Page 125 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

to data supervision and the length of conservation. Common
standards and norms could be adopted, particularly in the EU

where many citizens fear that the pandemic will force a trade-off
between privacy and health. But as Margrethe Vestager, the EU
Commissioner for Competition, observed:

I think that is a false dilemma, because you can do so
many things with technology that are not invasive of your

privacy. I think that, very often, when people say it’s only
doable in one way, it’s because they want the data for their
own purposes. We have made a set of guidelines, and with

member states we have translated that into a toolbox, so that
you can do a voluntary app with decentralized storage, with
Bluetooth technology. You can use technology to track the
virus, but you can still give people the freedom of choice, and,
in doing that, people trust that the technology is for virus

tracking and not for any other purposes. I think it is essential
that we show that we really mean it when we say that you
should be able to trust technology when you use it, that this is

not a start of a new era of surveillance. This is for virus
tracking, and this can help us open our societies. [125]

Again, we want to emphasize that this is a fast-moving and
highly volatile situation. The announcement made in April by
Apple and Google that they are collaborating to develop an app

that health officials could use to reverse-engineer the movements
and connections of a person infected by the virus points to a
possible way out for societies most concerned about data privacy

and that fear digital surveillance above anything else. The person
who carries the mobile would have to voluntarily download the
app and would have to agree to share the data, and the two
companies made it clear that their technology would not be
provided to public-health agencies that do not abide by their

privacy guidelines. But voluntary contact-tracing apps have a
problem: they do preserve the privacy of their users but are only
effective when the level of participation is sufficiently high – a

collective-action problem that underlines once again the
profoundly interconnected nature of modern life beneath the
individualist façade of rights and contractual obligations. No

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