The past few years have witnessed the rise of big data, which has upended established ways of doing business while promising to usher in a new era of digitally-defined analytics. While relatively few people were thinking about the role of big data when it comes to fighting health crises just a few years ago, the continued spread of COVID-19 has led many to ask how big data initiatives can help in a pandemic. It’s becoming increasingly clear that our ability to generate, record, and analyze data is an essential part of our pandemic response strategy.
From Israel to China, nation-states are embracing big data surveillance like never before to resist the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contact tracing is important
When it comes to responding to a pandemic like COVID-19, contact tracing is of immense importance. Contact tracing involves tracking down the individuals that you came into contact with after being exposed to a contagion like COVID-19; if we’re incapable of determining who the infected were in contact with once they became contagious, we’re incapable of preventing the spread of the infection. While contact tracing has been around for many years, it’s becoming better than ever before with a little help from big data.
Smartphone apps are now being designed and tested to ensure that contact tracing will be easy for everyday people to manage. While many everyday individuals would struggle to remember with specificity and accuracy who they met up with, when, and where, these apps will make it substantially easier to record and utilize such information in response to COVID-19. According to one report from the BBC, one such app is already being prepared in partnership with the British NHS to ensure future contact tracing is more robust.
We can thank big data for that, as only the generation, collection, and analysis of huge sums of data could make such apps possible. Elsewhere, we’re seeing other data-driven measures being implemented in an effort to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The state of Israel has embarked upon a massive cell phone surveillance campaign, according to a report from the Washington Post, in order to alert citizens that they may be infected based on an analysis of their digital data. Privacy skeptics have voiced concerns over the development of such technology, but during a pandemic those concerns mostly seem to be getting sidelined in favor of other political priorities.
Tech companies and digital gurus like YEAH! Local are being called upon these days more than ever before. In some countries such as China, however, fears abound that pandemic-related big data efforts could be the start of a new era of surveillance.
Disease mapping is easier – so are privacy violations
There’s no denying that big data enables us to map the spread of various diseases with greater accuracy and speed than ever before. Much in the same way that big data makes disease mapping easier, though, it also ensures that privacy violations are easier to come across. Human rights advocates have raised alarms about surveillance systems being implemented across China, which is desperately trying to avoid a second wave of infections.
While the big data and quarantine measures being leveraged in China are likely helping authorities resist the spread of the pandemic there, some fear that such surveillance systems won’t disappear when COVID-19 eventually does. Tech companies engaged in an effort to resist the coronavirus and other infectious diseases must thus walk an ethical minefield to ensure they don’t inadvertently create tools of tyranny. Nevertheless, health experts and political leaders are finding big data so helpful in fighting pandemics that we’re doubtlessly going to see it relied upon for the foreseeable future.
