Hard work is being done in healthcare to treat sick people and prevent further spread of corona. Not the time to talk about privacy. Or is it? When fighting infectious disease, data is vital. This includes personal data and thus privacy questions come up, just as they do with many working from home and sick colleagues. In this article, I highlight some aspects.
We know China as a country that does not shy away from technology to control citizens. They do exactly that in corona control as well. With heat-monitoring drones that determine who has a fever to facial recognition to maintain isolation of infectious individuals. People not wearing mouth caps are alerted by the drones. And there are interactive maps showing home and work addresses of infected persons.
In Israel, the corona fight uses the software otherwise used in the fight against terrorism. A lot of money has been invested in the technology, where facial recognition is also used. These tracking systems via cell phones have, they say, never before been used against Israeli citizens. Prime Minister Netanyahu calls corona "the invisible adversary." There is denial from all sides that data collected will be used for anything other than corona surveillance.
In Israel, as in China, people with opinions that differ from the government position are wary. Will data collected be kept and perhaps used to track opponents anyway?
Those who think that our Dutch government will never misuse collected data, I would like to ask them to remember the childcare allowance affair and the secret blacklist of "suspicious citizens" of the Tax Administration.
There is a lot of working from home these days. This also brings with it aspects of privacy and information security. Is it safe to work at home: secure connection, no storage of data on private computers, whether or not to take documents with you, the shielding of data from roommates, and more such issues.
Another aspect of working from home is employee privacy. Over-concerned employers are eager to verify that work is actually being done there at home, and do not shy away from pushing boundaries. Control through regular automatic screenshots to use of webcams to see if the employee is actually at his computer. "Is it allowed? No, of course not," writes lawyer and computer scientist Arnoud Engelfriet in a readable article on his website: "No, coronavirus is not an exemption for the AVG."
An employer almost never has the right to record medical records of employees himself. However, the employer can engage the occupational health and safety service or company doctor to check for corona. Article 9 of the AVG prohibits the processing of medical data unless there is an exception. If processing is necessary for preventive or occupational medicine (art. 9h) or for public health reasons (art. 9i), then it is permitted. According to the Public Health Act, there is a duty to report coronavirus. Such processing will generally take place with the company doctor. As an employer, you may talk about an infection, you just may not administer it. Employers may also ask if employees have been traveling, and based on that, ask them not to come to work. Consult an employment lawyer for employment law implications.
There have already been several reports of email campaigns taking advantage of the confusing situation surrounding the corona virus. An email has been spotted with an attachment on how to protect oneself from corona. This attachment contains a macro to infect the computer with malware. A world map has also been published on the Internet with the number of worldwide corona infections. That world map contains malware that attempts to steal information stored in the browser.
All the familiar alarm bells should ring: capitalizing on a sense of urgency, advice to bypass normal procedures, miracle medicines, messages or phone calls from official parties urging immediate action, and so on... Be alert.
Within healthcare facilities, you should leave caregivers alone right now; it's no time to stop by for a conversation about privacy. But now that probably all site visits have been cancelled, you may have time behind your desk to prepare a nice privacy risk survey and all kinds of informational actions. So that soon you will be well prepared at the start.
Martine van de Merwe is author of the book Care for Privacy
This article can also be found in the Coronavirus dossier
