privacy

Though this week has brought news of another outbreak of COVID-19 in Beijing, many people in Asia are already looking to a post-pandemic future. One of their major concerns is data privacy. Across the region, contact tracing apps were used to track citizens’ movements, and in many countries using these apps was mandatory.

Given the history of data privacy violations in China and other Asian countries, it seems legitimate to ask whether these apps will be used after the pandemic to continue to track citizens.

These concerns come on top of widespread worries about the eagerness of Asian governments to deploy new invasive technologies, such as the way that policymakers have attempted to undermine privacy in the cashless economy, and targeted tech startups for IP theft.

In this article, we’ll take a brief look at how governments in Asia dealt with privacy concerns during the pandemic, and assess the likelihood that privacy rights will be restored to citizens after the pandemic is over.

Tracing apps in Asia

Almost as soon as the pandemic broke out, countries in Asia began to develop technological systems for contact tracing. In the West, smartphone apps that were designed to perform this function faced much opposition: citizens were worried that they would undermine the push to make smartphones secure and that widespread data collection was a civil rights infringement.

Some countries in Asia had no such qualms. In Singapore, citizens were required to download an app named TraceTogether. In Hong Kong, quarantine orders on new arrivals were enforced via another app, StayHomeSafe, which relied on a wristband to track users’ movements and ensure that they stayed home.

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Infringements of these rules carried significant penalties: up to six months in prison and a potential HK$3,200 fine. Other countries in Asia have gone even further.

In South Korea, citizens were required to download an app that tracked all of their movements and sent citizens updates if they had potentially come into contact with a carrier of the disease.

Consent and privacy

There are two striking elements of the Asian response to the roll-out of these technologies. One is that governments in Asia, unlike their Western counterparts, largely ignored concerns that such apps violated the privacy of users.

The other, perhaps even more surprising, is that on the whole citizens in these countries welcomed the deployment of these apps.

In South Korea, for instance, have had great success in developing tracking apps that go well beyond the capabilities of the government-sanctioned system. Corona 100m, one such app, was downloaded over one million times in Korea in just a few weeks.

In addition, tracking apps like this appear to have huge support in South Korea: a government poll reported in Nikkei Asian Review found that more than 70 per cent of respondents supported the tracking of citizens through systems like this.

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These statistics point to a slightly problematic characteristic of data privacy in Asia. There appears to be a higher level of consent, at least in some countries, for the government to collect data on citizens.

To see the extent of the difference between Asia and the West when it comes to data privacy, it’s instructive to look at attempts to roll out contact tracing apps in Europe.

The ability to track contacts during infectious diseases has been around for more than a decade, and Cambridge University’s voluntary FluPhone app was an early example in 2011. Using the app was voluntary, and fewer than one per cent of people in the test area downloaded it.

Striking a Balance

All this said it should be noted that the COVID-19 outbreak has been a unique situation, and it’s unlikely that such high levels of consent for government surveillance would be seen outside of a global pandemic. Nonetheless, the relatively unopposed roll-out of these apps across Asia raises some worrying questions about what will happen to digital privacy after the pandemic.

A warning sign of what could happen comes from China. Contact tracing apps were not mandated in that country, but not because the government wasn’t tracking its citizens.

Instead, and as The Economist reported a few months ago, Beijing merely re-purposed its already huge programme of digital surveillance. In other words, citizens in China did not need to download a specific app for the government to know where they were at any particular moment, because the government already has this information.

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It could be argued, of course, that a slight hit to citizens’ privacy is a small price to pay for saving hundreds (or thousands) of lives through contact tracing. Nonetheless, contact tracing apps of the kind seen all over the continent are a worrying sign that governments across the region – and even in some of its more liberal states – are willing to use emergency powers to track their citizens. This will not, fear some analysts, be a capability that they will give up easily.

A clash of values

Ultimately, the differing debates in the West and Asia regarding the privacy implications of contact tracing illuminate the deep rift between the two regions when it comes to views about the legitimate power of the state.

Countries in the West have struggled to roll out surveillance programs of the kind seen in Asia, and not least because doing so appears to undermine the core values that underpin these democracies.

The future is always difficult to predict, but it is clear that there is a balance to be struck in Asia between respecting the private lives of citizens and allowing governments the tools to respond to emergencies. It’s unlikely that activists in the region will be able to convince politicians to give up these systems entirely.

But perhaps new technologies, such as blockchain and the kind of de-centralised apps being trialed in the USA, can provide a more private future for the citizens of Asia.

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