More than half of American citizens are estimated to be willing to share their medical data and records related to COVID-19, but they continue to fear that the government is monitoring them.
As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases reaches 30 million worldwide, governments are looking for ways to mitigate serious outbreaks so as not to overwhelm hospitals.
One of the proposed methods is contact tracing, an idea that relies on people providing various relevant information about themselves, such as places they visit. The aim is to create an app that will notify users if they have come into contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19. Track-and-trace systems are at various stages of development. The Protect Scotland was recently launched, and EU countries have begun testing a continent-wide interoperability portal.
These types of apps may be able to track the spread of COVID-19 around the world, but privacy remains a major issue, especially if mobile and location data ends up on central servers that government agencies for purposes other than containing the pandemic.
On Wednesday, Virtru released the results of a study exploring American citizens' views on contact tracing and sharing their medical records in the fight against COVID-19.
The research is based on a survey conducted by The Harris Poll for Virtru in July. The survey included more than 2,000 American citizens, over the age of 18.
Overall, just over half of U.S. citizens – 52% – said they would be willing to share their medical records and data, even beyond COVID-19, with government agencies if it would help fight the pandemic. If given control over access to their own information and able to block access or delete data at any time, 61% would be willing to do so.
However, when it comes to the information collected by contact tracing apps, such as location and user data, 42% of survey respondents were not sure that this is good for their privacy.
Overall, the greatest trust exists in tracing apps provided by healthcare providers and technology companies, with 34% and 28% of respondents saying they would trust them.
The idea of a “surveillance state” is also on the minds of many, due to the well-known US mass surveillance programs , mass data collection and efforts to force technology providers to intentionally install backdoors in encrypted services . Overall, 62% of respondents cited these issues as a potential barrier to their willingness to share their medical data. Overall, 31% of respondents said that the government’s stance so far has had a “major impact” on their willingness to share sensitive medical information.
