New York City’s COVID-19 tracing efforts raise privacy concerns

According to Politico, New York City has for the moment failed to provide a detailed plan on how it will keep data private and secure, as part of its ongoing manual COVID-19 tracing efforts. While up to 10000 contact tracers are expected to work on collecting personal and health information from Covid-19-positive individuals as well as their encounters, activists and privacy experts worry that strong confidentiality rules and privacy protections are not in place, and may undermine tracing efforts. This situation for instance could lead immigrant and marginalized communities to be less responsive to the tracing efforts, due to fears that such information could be shared with other authorities and potentially jeopardize the immigrant status of their relatives.