Name: Immunity Passports Are a Threat to Our Privacy and Information Security
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Immunity Passports Are a Threat to Our Privacy and Information Security

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItWith states beginning to ease shelter-in-place restrictions, the conversation on COVID-19 has turned to questions of when and how we can return to work, take kids to school, or plan air travel.Several and U.S. states, including the UK, Italy, Chile, Germany, and , have expressed interest in so-called “immunity passports”—a system of requiring people to present supposed proof of immunity to COVID-19 in order to access public spaces, work sites, airports, schools, or other venues. In many proposed schemes, this proof would be stored in a digital token on a phone. Immunity passports would threaten our privacy and information security, and would be a significant step toward a system of national digital identification that can be used to collect and store our personal information and track our location.Immunity passports are purportedly intended to help combat the spread of COVID-19. But there is little evidence that they would actually accomplish that.On a practical level, there is currently no test for COVID-19 immunity; what we have are antibody tests. But we don’t know whether people with antibodies have immunity. Meanwhile, there has been a flood of flawed tests and fraudulent marketing schemes about antibody tests. Even when validated tests are widely available, they may not be 100 percent accurate. The system should be a non-starter unless it can guarantee due process for those who want to challenge their test results. This has often been a problem before; as we saw with the “no-fly” lists created after 9/11, , even for those whose inclusion was a mistake. The problem with immunity passports isn’t just medical—it’s ethical. Access to both COVID-19 testing and antibody testing is spotty. Reports abound of people who fear they have been infected desperately trying to get tested to no avail. has shown that African Americans are far less likely than white, Hispanic, or Asian patients to be tested before they end up in the emergency room. Mobile testing sites administered by Verily (a subsidiary of Google’s parent Alphabet) require people to have a smartphone and a Google account. Residents in San Francisco’s district, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, were turned away from testing sites because they didn’t have cell phones. Requiring smartphone-based immunity verification to access public spaces like offices and schools would exacerbate existing inequities and reinforce a two-tiered system of the privileged, who can move about freely in society, and the vulnerable, who can’t work, shop, or attend school because they don’t have a cell phone or access to testing.&nbsp;We’ve been here before. When yellow fever struck the South in the 1850s, those thought to be “ to the disease were unemployable. This burdened Black and lower-income people more than privileged members of society. As we saw then, conditioning access to society on immunity incentivizes “bug-chasing”—that is, people deliberately trying to get sick in order to get the immunity passport. No one should have to expose themselves to a potentially deadly disease with no cure to find work.The push for immunity passports has largely been premised on the promise of technological solutions to a public health crisis.&nbsp;A , for example, would use blockchain technology to facilitate an immunity passport system on peoples’ smartphones. We this bill. Technological advancements such as blockchain technology or other methods of implementation do not address our objections to this type of system in and of itself.Moreover, digital-format immunity passports could normalize digital-format proof-of-status documents more generally. Advocates of immunity passports visualize a world where we can’t pass through a door to a workplace, school, or restaurant until the gatekeeper scans our credentials. This would habituate gatekeepers to demand such status credentials, and habituate the public to submit to these demands.This digital system could easily be expanded to check not just a person’s immunity status, but any other bit of personal information that a gatekeeper might deem relevant, such as age, pregnancy, HIV status, or criminal history. The system could also be adjusted to document not just a particular person’s status, but also when that person passed through a door that required proof of such status. And all data of all such passages could be accumulated into one database. This would be a troubling step towards digital national identification, which EFF has because it would create new ways to digitally monitor our movements and activities.Digital-format documentation also brings the risk of presenting such documentation under duress to varying authorities. Handing over your phone to police, unlocked or not, includes significant risks, especially for people in vulnerable communities—risks that could lead to unintended consequences for the presenter and a potential abuse of power by law enforcement.Moreover, requiring people to store their medical test results in a digital format would expose private medical information to the danger of data breaches. Again, this is hardly new—we have seen exactly these types of breaches in the past when medical information has been digitized and collected. Just last year, for example, an leaked the personal information of more than 14,000 individuals living with HIV.We should learn from our past mistakes, and ensure that technology works to empower people, instead of creating new vulnerabilities.&nbsp;&nbsp;Share ItIn the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a location data broker called Veraset offered officials in Washington, DC full access to its proprietary database of “highly sensitive” , collected from cell phones, for the entire DC metro area.The officials accepted the offer, according to ...Vaccine mandates are becoming increasingly urgent from public health officials and various governments. As they roll out, we must protect users of vaccine passports and those who do not want to use—or cannot use—a digitally scannable means to prove vaccination. We cannot let the tools used to fight for public...This post was updated on 6/29/21 to more accurately describe how New York is running its voluntary vaccine passport programThe State of California recently released what it calls a “.” It is part of that state’s of...The U.S. is distributing more vaccines and . Returning to regular means of activity and movement has become the main focus for many Americans who want to travel or see family. An increasingly common proposal to get there is digital proof-of-vaccination,...As the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has begun across the U.S., there have been of people having trouble getting it—not just because of its limited availability, but also because some counties and states . This...We're excited to have yet another "At Home with the EFF" event coming up this , with panels making sense of all the online censorship issues emerging this year. From the takedown of Parler to Trump getting banned, we'll offer an insider look on how censorship decisions...Location tracking apps. Spyware to enforce quarantine. Immunity passports. Throughout 2020, governments around the world deployed invasive surveillance technologies to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.But heavy-handed tactics like these , precisely when trust is needed most. They also invade our privacy and...In a year that saw every facet of online life reshaped the coronavirus pandemic, online content moderation and platform censorship were no exception. After a successful to encourage large platforms to adopt best practices and endorse the , 2020...A COVID vaccine has been approved and . With them have come proposals of ways to prove you have been vaccinated, based on the presumption that vaccination renders a person immune and unable to spread the virus. The latter is ...Today California joined dozens of other states and countries in launching its COVID-19 exposure notification app, CA Notify, built on API. Google and Apple’s API is already used in , as well as countries , ...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItWith states beginning to ease shelter-in-place restrictions, the conversation on COVID-19 has turned to questions of when and how we can return to work, take kids to school, or plan air travel.Several and U.S. states, including the UK, Italy, Chile, Germany, and , have expressed interest in so-called “immunity passports”—a system of requiring people to present supposed proof of immunity to COVID-19 in order to access public spaces, work sites, airports, schools, or other venues. In many proposed schemes, this proof...

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Alexis Hancock

Karen Gullo

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Immunity Passports Are a Threat to Our Privacy and Information Security

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