Sanderson P

Bio: Sanderson P is an academic researcher from Future of Privacy Forum. The author has contributed to research in topics: Information privacy & Public health. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 1 citations.

COVID-19 and Digital Contact Tracing: Regulating the Future of Public Health Surveillance

Abstract: Digital surveillance tools⎼⎼technological means of monitoring, tracking, and notifying⎼⎼are at the forefront of public health response strategies for the COVID-19 pandemic. Comprehensive and effective digital public health surveillance requires that public health authorities, regulatory powers, and developers consider interdisciplinary approaches. This entails accounting for the use of tracking technologies and location and proximity data; notification systems from tech companies; and laws and regulations associated with health information, biometric privacy, and mobile data. Of particular importance is incorporation of epidemiological considerations in development and implementation of digital tools, including usability across mobile devices, interoperability, regulation of literacy and disability compatibility, and incentivization for adoption. It is both feasible and prudent that the United States establish a federal network for public health surveillance aided by digital tools, especially considering that waves of COVID-19 are expected to continue well into 2021 and while the threat of other emerging infectious diseases persists.

Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization

Abstract: Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. Two decades later, it fails any reasonable test of responsible global stewardship of digital information and communications. The abdication of the world’s information spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all other crises. The surveillance capitalist giants–Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and their ecosystems–now constitute a sweeping political-economic institutional order that exerts oligopolistic control over most digital information and communication spaces, systems, and processes. The commodification of human behavior operationalized in the secret massive-scale extraction of human-generated data is the foundation of surveillance capitalism’s two-decade arc of institutional development. However, when revenue derives from commodification of the human, the classic economic equation is scrambled. Imperative economic operations entail accretions of governance functions and impose substantial social harms. Concentration of economic power produces collateral concentrations of governance and social powers. Oligopoly in the economic realm shades into oligarchy in the societal realm. Society’s ability to respond to these developments is thwarted by category errors. Governance incursions and social harms such as control over AI or rampant disinformation are too frequently seen as distinct crises and siloed, each with its own specialists and prescriptions, rather than understood as organic effects of causal economic operations. In contrast, this paper explores surveillance capitalism as a unified field of institutional development. Its four already visible stages of development are examined through a two-decade lens on expanding economic operations and their societal effects, including extraction and the wholesale destruction of privacy, the consequences of blindness-by-design in human-to-human communications, the rise of AI dominance and epistemic inequality, novel achievements in remote behavioral actuation such as the Trump 2016 campaign, and Apple-Google’s leverage of digital infrastructure control to subjugate democratic governments desperate to fight a pandemic. Structurally, each stage creates the conditions and constructs the scaffolding for the next, and each builds on what went before. Substantively, each stage is characterized by three vectors of accomplishment: novel economic operations, governance carve-outs, and fresh social harms. These three dimensions weave together across time in a unified architecture of institutional development. Later-stage harms are revealed as effects of the foundational-stage economic operations required for commodification of the human. Surveillance capitalism’s development is understood in the context of a larger contest with the democratic order—the only competing institutional order that poses an existential threat. The democratic order retains the legitimate authority to contradict, interrupt, and abolish surveillance capitalism’s foundational operations. Its unique advantages include the ability to inspire action and the necessary power to make, impose, and enforce the rule of law. While the liberal democracies have begun to engage with the challenges of regulating today’s privately owned information spaces, I argue that regulation of institutionalized processes that are innately catastrophic for democratic societies cannot produce desired outcomes. The unified field perspective suggests that effective democratic contradiction aimed at eliminating later-stage harms, such as “disinformation,” depends upon the abolition and reinvention of the early-stage economic operations that operationalize the commodification of the human, the source from which such harms originate. The clash of institutional orders is a death match over the politics of knowledge in the digital century. Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic economic imperatives produce a zero-sum dynamic in which the deepening order of surveillance capitalism propagates democratic disorder and deinstitutionalization. Without new public institutions, charters of rights, and legal frameworks purpose-built for a democratic digital century, citizens march naked, easy prey for all who steal and hunt with human data. Only one of these contesting orders will emerge with the authority and power to rule, while the other will drift into deinstitutionalization, its functions absorbed by the victor. Will these contradictions ultimately defeat surveillance capitalism, or will democracy suffer the greater injury? It is possible to have surveillance capitalism, and it is possible to have a democracy. It is not possible to have both.

Assessing the Governance of Digital Contact Tracing in Response to COVID-19: Results of a Multi-National Study

Abstract: Abstract This paper describes the results of a multi-country survey of governance approaches for the use of digital contact tracing (DCT) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the countries in our survey represent two distinct models of DCT governance, both of which are flawed. The “data protection model” emphasizes privacy protections at the expense of public health benefit, while the “emergency response model” sacrifices transparency and accountability, prompting concerns about excessive governance surveillance. The ethical and effective use of DCT in the future requires a new governance approach that is better suited to this novel use of mobile phone data to promote public health.”

Beyond legislation and technological design: The importance and implications of institutional trust for privacy issues of digital contact tracing

Abstract: For proper implementation of digital contact tracing technologies for fighting against SARS-CoV-2, participants' privacy vulnerability and the uncertainty from the relevant institutions' side could be seen as two core elements that should be dealt with, among others. In this paper, we propose to understand the current approaches for preserving privacy, referred to as privacy by legislation and privacy by technological design, as distrusting strategies that primarily work to reduce participants' vulnerability by specifying and implementing privacy standards related to this digital solution. We point out that mere distrusting strategies are insufficient for the ethically appropriate development of this digital solution, nor can they eliminate the need for institutional trust that plays an essential role in fostering voluntary support for this solution. To reach well-grounded trust in both an ethical and epistemological sense, we argue that trust in institutions concerning personal data protection in the case of digital contact tracing ought to be built on the relevant institutions' and individuals' goodwill towards the public and their competence in improving the actual effectiveness of this solution. We conclude by clarifying three dimensions, including the purpose, procedure, and outcome, where the relevant trustees can work to signal and justify their intentions and increase their trustworthiness via an effective communication strategy. Given the complementary qualities shown by the distrusting and trusting strategies, a combined strategy including both sorts seems closer to what we expect from the responsible implementation of this digital solution, which could also improve the effectiveness of this institutional response.

COVID-19 and the Law: A Compilation of Legal Resources

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic presents a number of questions concerning the law These legal issues involve not only international law, but also the national laws of the nation-states affected by this global crisis Commentators from around the world have considered many of these legal issues and offered their insights in a variety of online forums This matrix brings together all known resources (eg, journal articles, online commentaries, opinion-editorials, and press statements) on the legal aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and provides internet hyperlinks to all of these online publications Aggregating nearly 1,000 legal resources, the compilation is organized by 33 topics and subtopics, including: • INTERNATIONAL LAW (International Law: Generally, Advisory Court Opinions, Demographics and Discrimination, Development, Disaster Relief Law, Global Health Security, Human Rights, Information and Cyber, International Criminal Law, International Environmental Law, International Humanitarian Law, International Migration Law and Travel, International Peace and Security, International Trade Law, Investment Treaties, Maritime Security and Safety Law, State Obligations, State Responsibility, Terrorism, Transnational Organized Crime); • NATIONAL LAW (Civil Liability, Employment Law, Intellectual Property); • NATIONAL SECURITY LAW (Civil Liberties and Rights, Continuity of Government, Emergency Powers, Federalism, Immigration, Information and Cyber, Law Enforcement, Military Support, Surveillance); and • LAW-RELATED TOPIC (Teaching Law)

Changes to public health surveillance programs, systems and strategies due to the COVID-19 pandemic: A scoping review (Preprint)

Abstract: Public health surveillance plays a vital role in informing public health decision making. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 caused a widespread shift in public health priorities. Global efforts focused on COVID-19 monitoring and contact tracing. Existing public health programs were interrupted due to physical distancing measures and re-allocation of resources. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic intersected with advancements in technologies that have the potential to support public health surveillance efforts. This scoping review explores emergent public health surveillance methods during the early COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 241 articles describing novel surveillance methods and changes to surveillance methods are included. This literature was dominated by applications of digital surveillance, for example by using Big Data through mobility tracking and infodemiology. Wastewater surveillance was also heavily represented. Other articles described adaptations to programs that existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as remote screening via videoconferencing. The scoping search also found 109 articles that discuss the ethical, legal, security and equity implications of emerging surveillance methods. While the pandemic accelerated advancements in surveillance, there is a need for cautious consideration of potential harms in implementing these methods.