Abstract
It's December 2023. I look out of the window, and, in my street, I see the usual hustle and bustle. People hurrying to fulfill the tasks of another day, cars honking their horns in a hurry to get to their destination, schools full of students and teachers, shops open, and commercial activities working “normally.” Masks are no longer worn on faces, hands are no longer disinfected after opening a door, lift buttons are no longer pressed with the house key, and supermarket purchases no longer need to be quarantined for two days before being put away. Nor do news broadcasts open with daily statistics centered on the number of cases of COVID-19.
Little time has passed, but we no longer remember the pandemic and it seems that COVID-19 was “in another life.” In Portugal, the hashtag #vaificartudobem (#it'sgonnabealright) became the battle cry that helped the government and health authorities convince the population to adopt protection and prevention measures. But, just over a year after we started the process of “returning to normality,” is everything really okay? We are obviously speaking from the privileged perspective of those who live in a developed country and, certainly, the reality will be different in other geographies. However, the coronavirus seems to have given way or, at least, we no longer hear about it and, above all, make our routines dependent on the fear of the disease.
So, is everything okay, have we really returned to the much-desired “normality”? Are our lives back to exactly what they were before the pandemic? Certainly not. We can now leave the house at will, but many of us have never been back to the office. Remote working, which was only a temporary measure, has become a reality for many people. In my case, at the University where I teach, classes have returned to their face-to-face format as soon as possible. However, remote meetings and public exams via Zoom are here to stay, as well as collaborative work facilitated by platforms such as Google Drive and iCloud.
This is arguably the biggest legacy of the pandemic: the accelerated development of digital technologies. Some already existed and others were developed to fulfill two fundamental purposes: to replace our physical presence in common everyday tasks and to facilitate contact tracing to identify people exposed to the coronavirus. But have we had the opportunity to stop and think about the consequences of the exacerbated development of these digital technologies? Do we know where the personal and professional data that we enter on our smartphones to access applications such as Zoom, Teams, Google Drive, and all the other tools that have been created in several countries in the field of public health, to track possible contacts with the virus, go and how they are processed (in Portugal this tool was called Stayaway Covid)?
The book Pandemic Surveillance by David Lyon, gives us a careful and very pertinent reading on the development and use of these digital technologies. As Lyon recalls, shortly after the pandemic was declared, smartphones were sought out to spearhead the launch of the first digital contact tracing systems, using location data to identify possible exposure to the virus. So, as early as April 2020, major tech companies such as Google and Apple teamed up with governments in several countries to create these apps to support pandemic surveillance. But what is pandemic surveillance anyway? According to the WHO (cited by Lyon, 2021: 5) we can define it as ‘ongoing, systematic, collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data essential to the planning, implementation and evaluation of public health practice.’ In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this surveillance was used to understand where people were, where they had been and their health status, in order to identify individuals potentially exposed to the virus.
It is true that, in an unexpected context of the rapid spread of a new virus, governments around the world have responded with mitigation policies to contain the spread of the disease. As mentioned by Ruão and Silva (2021), prevention behaviors, such as washing hands frequently and maintaining social distancing, were thoroughly communicated to the public as important measures to combat the spread of COVID-19. Swift action was needed. These surveillance systems are part of that ‘package of measures’ that was presented to citizens as the only solution to survive the pandemic with the least possible harm to all. However, until now, it seems that we have not had much time to reflect on the dangers of using our personal data on these digital platforms. But, as David Lyon reminds us in this book, there were several warnings from the start that there could be consequences for civil liberties, as technologies have not been restricted to contact tracing, but have come to dominate and control our everyday tasks, including school, work, the purchase of goods and services, and communication with family and friends.
Surveillance capitalism and surveillance pandemic are terms that Lyon uses to describe the current context in which we are witnessing a dominance of digital technologies in our lives. And we put this in the present tense, because as the author advocated, these infrastructures persist in the post-pandemic world and put citizens’ privacy and security at risk. In addition, they also emphasize inequalities of social class, gender, race, among others, because there is no equal access to equipment or digital technologies.
Focusing on analyzing the impacts of these surveillance technologies, Lyon has structured his work in seven chapters where he seeks to discuss the multiple ways in which the pandemic has given rise to surveillance capitalism, in which governments and large technology companies have come together to make people visible and use their data for purposes that go beyond preventing the spread of the virus. To this end, the author has gathered his data from secondary sources and conversations with colleagues from various countries, such as Australia, Brazil, China, Guatemala, India, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel/Palestine, Singapore, as well as Canada and some European countries, seeking to paint a global and diverse picture.
After chapter 1, ‘Defining moments,’ in which Lyon contextualizes the main moments of the pandemic and presents the objectives of the book, in chapter 2 ‘Disease-drive surveillance,’ Lyon addresses what he calls the ‘Panoply of digital surveillance,’ comparing the main technologies used to facilitate digital localization and contact tracing during the COVID-19 outbreak, such as smartphone apps, fit bits, Apple watches. Although these tools are voluntary in most countries, in his analysis Lyon concluded that India was the only democratic country that made the use of contact tracing systems mandatory. In this chapter, the author also pointed out that this sharing of health data gave rise to less visible but highly significant instances of digital surveillance, as it exposes individuals in terms of their geographical location and daily habits, putting privacy at risk.
In chapter 3, ‘Domestic targets,’ Lyon focuses on the changes that lockdowns have brought to domestic and labor tasks and explores how, overnight, our homes have become sites of permanent surveillance. The classroom has moved into the bedroom, the office has taken over the living room and the search for essentials has become a mouse scroll. All this has been made possible by the massive use of digital apps that share our data with big companies and expose our home and family lives. In addition, technologies have offered new possibilities for organizations to monitor the workplace, enabled an unprecedented increase in online shopping, and improved brand preference records based on our purchase history. All the everyday actions we replace with our digital presence carry great risks to our privacy and security, as Lyon warns.
Certainly, in the context of the pandemic, data have become even more central both to mitigate the disease and to allow our lives to continue, albeit inside our homes. But is it, as the author of the book asks in chapter 4 ‘Data sees all?’ This section explores how the data collected is also a way of ‘not seeing’ (p. 73), contributing to intensifying situations of social disadvantage. Indeed, Lyon reminds us that all data allow us to know only one point of view of reality and this easily overlooks important aspects within each community, which can lead to false feelings of security or decontextualized moments of panic.
The truth is that COVID-19 has exposed the most vulnerable populations, showing inequalities in access to healthcare, tests, and vaccines. Minorities in society and groups living in poverty tend to be most penalized by the pandemic. At the same time, these groups are also often marginalized by technological surveillance. Chapter 5, ‘Disadvantage and triage,’ examines these issues. Firstly, the question of equal access arises. The starting point for the use of contact tracing systems is the existence of a smartphone or a mobile device capable of supporting the application. This puts aside all people who do not have this equipment and who are usually those with lower economic capacities or who live in countries where access to these technologies is limited. Even so, once the physical barrier of having a smartphone is overcome, literacy problems related to the ability to use these tools and manage applications properly remain. At this point, exclusion can be even greater, as regardless of countries’ level of development or economic and financial situation, people in higher age groups tend to have greater difficulty implementing digital technologies in their daily lives. As Lyon found in China, for example, it is estimated that more than 250 million older people do not use a smartphone. This highlights inequalities in health surveillance and can jeopardize the reliability of the collected data.
From another perspective, chapter 6, ‘Democracy and power,’ exposes the increase in state surveillance that has been stimulated by the pandemic. Giants such as Google, Apple, Huawei, and IBM have partnered with governments in many countries to produce contact-tracing apps. These public-private partnerships, however, are unclear as to how the data are used and raise important questions of privacy and data protection but also of control. The author of this work has realized that in some countries, such as Japan, the pandemic has been used as an opportunity to strengthen and expand existing surveillance systems. Moreover, it was also highlighted that this surveillance context would not cease when the WHO declared the end of the pandemic. The UK illustrates this conclusion, as the government intends to retain personal data collected during this period for 20 years.
Finally, in chapter 7, ‘Doorway to hope,’ Lyon seeks to draw together the lessons learned so far from the COVID-19 pandemic to point to a different path in future situations. In his view, if pandemic surveillance proves to be uneven, the first concern in the future should be the pursuit of ‘data justice,’ which presupposes special attention to how people are made visible, represented, and treated, while respecting the cultural differences of nations and communities. This view was also shared by Simon and Reader (2021) in a study they conducted to examine the public debates surrounding the initial development of the German Corona-Warn-App in 2020. In this work, the academics concluded that securing moral principles as well as public debates is important for the development of technologies that can win public trust, and, as Lyon found, this does not seem to be an impossible journey. In this regard, Taiwan represented a fortunate example, implementing a digital democracy strategy that brought government and civil society together in a logic of trust and transparency to facilitate the digital transition required by the pandemic.
Pandemic Surveillance brings us a fundamental and pertinent vision. Reading Lyon's work allows us to see beyond the benefits of the digital transition and shows us that the downside of pandemic surveillance is inevitable. The author does not, however, present us with a fatalistic view of technological development in the pandemic context. Indeed, he recognizes the benefits of contact-tracing apps that have been important in alerting people, mitigating contagion, and slowing the spread of the virus. However, with his analysis, Lyon concluded that data processing left a lot to be desired in some countries.
Nonetheless, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. It is possible to link technological development with people's interests if, as concluded by Lyon in this book and by Simom and Reader (2021), there is a continuous and transparent dialogue among governments, businesses, and citizens. In the context of public health crises in particular, previous experiences have shown that people's engagement is key in adhering to measures that facilitate virus containment (Shen et al., 2015). This involvement, however, depends on the ability of governments and health authorities to communicate information transparently and effectively (Miller and Jarvis, 2020), involving citizens in decisions that affect their lives and, above all, interfere with their privacy and security. Thus, we can conclude by stating that the definition of transparent communication strategies between governments and citizens is a very important aspect in global health crisis contexts, even more so when these moments of crisis are characterized by rapid digital transition.