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The economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been swift. U.S. retail sales have collapsed, and industrial production has fallen precipitously. But even as the government remains focused on containing the virus and caring for the sick, policymakers and business leaders are starting to reopen the economy.
As they wrestle with how to bring back workers safely, key questions have emerged around how best to confirm that employees are healthy and able to work, while also protecting their workers’ personal privacy. Public health officials say that collecting personal health data may be only to track the virus to understand who is immune from it and who is most at risk. But privacy advocates have raised concerns about how that data will be used and by whom, as well as how and where it’s stored.
Read: Bill Gates says for the U.S. to safely reopen, it needs testing, testing, testing
One promising solution is the idea of creating personal digital identities. Sophisticated digital tools — similar to those used in electronic payment mechanisms — could be used to certify people’s health status and the sensitive information could be kept by hospitals or citizen-owned cooperative institutions in order to protect personal privacy.
There is widespread agreement among experts that restarting the economy requires more testing for the virus. Reliable blood tests could certify people who are likely to be immune from the illness, and therefore “safe” to rejoin the workforce. Although there are substantial questions around degree and duration of immunity and duration, this sort of certification is familiar: we already require tuberculosis test documentation for food workers and proof of vaccinations for childcare workers, for instance, even though these have never provided 100% certainty.
Those confirmed to have antibodies — let’s call them “safe workers” — could help prop up the workforce until a vaccine becomes available. They could, for instance, be cleared to go back to work in front-of-house, public-facing jobs, which would allow companies, governments, and hospitals to hire workers who do not pose health risks for their customers or patients. Workers who are more vulnerable, or who lack the certification, could perform back-room functions with less human contact.
The creation of a safe workforce is driving some of the most successful efforts at suppressing the disease in certain Asian countries, including Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. These nations relied on “Big Brother”-like use of personal data and authoritarian enforcement of quarantine and isolation. As the disease and recovery progresses, these countries now have a certified legion of safe workers that can help restart the economy. But in democratic countries, this approach is seen as a threat to civil liberties.
Digital identities
To ensure that privacy is preserved, hospitals, cooperatives such as credit unions, or other trusted local organizations could serve as repositories for people’s health data, much as they already do for their other personal information. This would form the basis of citizens’ “digital identity,” and would determine their appropriateness to work and perform other activities. A key point is keeping personal data in local institutions that already have a “need to know” or are under direct citizen control. This avoids the creation of national or state-wide registries since these are tempting targets for misuse.
This health certification, which could be easily integrated into the digital identity infrastructure that is already used for authenticating payments, could also help decide what sort of businesses are safe to reopen, and make contact tracing more efficient, without endangering personal privacy. This could be accomplished by the use of either high-tech methods, such as Secure Multiparty Computation, which is already deployed for some types of updates on mobile phones, or the creation of simple “risk maps” already in use by public health authorities. With this kind of digital identity, people can confirm their health status to a participating merchant or employer in the same way their credit card or identity is certified today.
To be sure, there may be unintended consequences to creating unique digital identities and questions linger. For example, will it divide the American workforce into two tiers: those are who believed to have some immunity to the virus and are therefore able to work and travel, and those who are still at risk? And will it unleash shunning and discrimination toward those who have not been tested?
We don’t yet know the answers to those questions. We do know that getting people back to work safely is imperative and that digital tools are an important part of the solution to will help reopen the country. But personal privacy shouldn’t be sacrificed as a result.
Alex “Sandy” Pentland is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts & Science at MIT and the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. He is the author of the recent white paper: “Restarting the Economy and Avoiding Big Brother.”
