The debate between whether privacy or safety is more important has been ongoing for decades within our technological revolution. Very recently TechCrunch reported that Albion, a college in Michigan, was using an app to contact trace and track their students. Not only does the app track a student's location 24/7, but Albion made the app mandatory for their students to download. Making this major privacy concern even worse is the fact that the app was not even safe in itself. The app had two major security vulnerabilities, one being that one can access the app's backend servers and the other being that you can infer another student's COVID status.
I would say that this app is unnecessarily intrusive. While I understand that measures like these are essential to keeping people safe, there becomes a line that you can cross very quickly. Making an app that tracks 24/7 mandatory to download is stepping over that line tenfold. The decision making behind this app just feels sloppy and lazy. What makes Albion think that it is ok to say to a student if I can not use an app to track you 24/7 I will suspend you? If they were to make this app optional and had different options for students who preferred their privacy then this would be a better situation for everyone.
An app like this would never work at Penn State. A massive privacy breach such as this would get torched by the media at a larger and more known college like PSU.
The balance between safety and privacy is a very delicate matter. When data security is done right, I believe that safety usually triumphs. Whenever I have to choose between which is more important I think back to a tragedy like 9/11 where if we had less privacy then there would be a chance that the attack would have been prevented. When our data privacy is left in the right hands and is properly secured then it is worth it to save lives. This case with Albion is an outlier, however, as they had multiple security breaches with the app and making it mandatory that your movements are tracked 24/7 is a step too far.
There are many ethical alternatives that Albion could have done. For instance, they could have implemented randomized tests every day on a small percentage of their student population. If a student is positive then they can just ask the student who they have been in contact with as a very simple solution.
Updates to my COVID diagram
Conceptual:
Physical:
Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KETdBeLwFl0C7uBgFBdwKauY-Gz2DcjE/view
(screencastify cut off on me at the end of the video so I had to rush the tuple explanation)
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