Open data on the COVID-19 pandemic: anonymisation as a technical solution for transparency, privacy, and data protection

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted personal data mining. Various experiences in fighting the new coronavirus focus strictly on extensive data processing concerning not only health conditions, but also behaviours and relationships, allegedly to try to control the spread of the virus at any cost. Several approaches have been put forward by different government. In China, the government has been widely using body temperature, geolocation and user behaviour data to monitor the spread of the infection and commitment to quarantine, and scientists in the USA are processing global scale data to find vaccines for the virus. Stakeholders in Brazil have been trying to follow similar approaches. This vast data processing raises concerns on uses for secondary purposes that citizens might be unaware of, such as the use for surveillance activities, which may involve intrusive tools implemented by governments. For instance, InLoco, a Brazilian company involved with the use of geolocation for contact tracing, allegedly processes only anonymized data pursuant to the Brazilian Data Protection Legislation, ‘Lei Geral de Proteç~ ao de Dados’—LGPD. Although it claims to implement anonymization techniques in its privacy Key Points