Abstract
The Turkey government has been attacking privacy for years now. Could the battle to control coronavirus eradicate what is left, asks
Now, as surveillance becomes a public-health tactic to tackle Covid-19, Turks face a conundrum: can they trust an autocratic state which may save their lives via contact-tracing not to come after them later for political reasons? In fighting Covid-19, could Turks give away what little they have left of their privacy?
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rules by decree. Whatever he says goes. And he’s made no secret of his plans to exploit the current situation. When he asked citizens to use the Life Fits Home app, developed by Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority, it was a rhetorical question.
A woman receives a free food parcel at her home. People over 65 are banned from leaving their homes as part of Covid-19 restrictions
CREDIT: Umit Bektas/Reuters
“Life Fits Home lets patients monitor their recovery; it also allows us to monitor their movements,” health minister Fahrettin Koca said in April.
When Covid-19-infected users venture out, the app reminds them to self-isolate at home. It then notifies the closest police officer on duty.
The tracker’s statistics detail infection rates, but its wealth of geolocation data could also help authorities to pursue citizens.
“Turkey won’t only get rid of this coronavirus; it will also get rid of its media viruses and political viruses, God willing!” Erdogan declared in April, accusing journalists of spreading fake news.
“Life Fits Home is open to misuse,” Kerem Altıparmak, the head of the Human Rights Centre of the Ankara Bar Association, told Index.
“We can’t foresee how the app’s data will be used, or by whom; there is no information about how to file a complaint in cases of privacy violation. People will use it on a voluntary basis, the minister says, but most will download it out of health concerns, not by free will.”
Altıparmak is worried that the government could use Life Fits Home to limit personal freedom.
“The app requires a Turkish ID number for registration; it will know who you are and where you are, among other things,” Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, told Index.
“It’s not clear whether it’ll be used for ulterior purposes. This kind of data collection is a sensitive issue and could be misused by authorities.
“The fight against the Covid-19 pandemic should not be used as an opportunity to develop and use intrusive technologies on citizens.”
Privacy and data protection are major concerns in Turkey.
The CEOs of communications companies Turk Telekom and Turkcell are both pro-Erdogan, often parroting his line on “national and native technology” and supporting his policies in pro-Erdogan newspapers.
During the 2016 coup attempt, Turkcell, the country’s biggest mobile phone operator, disseminated the government’s “take over the streets” texts to millions.
But foreign tech companies who hold the lion’s share of Turks’ private data aren’t as easy to tame. In April, the government drafted a law demanding Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, to store its Turkey-based users’ data inside the country, allowing authorities access in case they required it.
The proposed law led to panicked WhatsApp conversations, and users deleted chat histories, fearing the government would word-search their conversations and prosecute them.
Not able to convince the public, the government withdrew the draft amendments. Akdeniz led the charge against this proposed law.
“It’s a constant challenge to defend fundamental rights in Turkey,” he said. “After the Covid-19 pandemic ends, Turkey has the potential to become more authoritarian – more people will be prosecuted for their criticism of the government.”
Speed, in his view, should be the focus of privacy advocates. When he and lawyer Altıparmak challenged the government’s Wikipedia ban at the Constitutional Court, it took 30 months before they could successfully reverse it.
Akdeniz worries that privacy campaigners will fail to catch up with the government’s pace and be unable to challenge its intrusive new technologies quickly enough in courts.
“It’ll take years to successfully challenge violations of privacy,” he said.
As Turkey steers away from the west, allying with China, Russia and Venezuela, public pronouncements of allegiance to the governing party and its leader have become widespread.
Turkey is a deeply divided country: around half of the country supported Erdogan in the latest presidential election, and public sector employees in the other half of the population must hide their discontent to retain their jobs. Privately, they may not much care for Erdogan and his loyalist wingmen, but they still have to sing their praises in public.
As Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate, wrote, “the gulf between the private and public views of our countrymen is evidence of the power of the state”.
Planned invasions into privacy may close this gulf and tilt the delicate balance.
Nate Schenkkan, the director for special research at Freedom House, acknowledges dangers concerning the privacy of ordinary Turkish citizens, but he is more worried about implications for dissidents, for whom violations of privacy have long been a major concern.
“The indictment of Osman Kavala, a rights defender and philanthropist imprisoned since 2017, is very much based on transcripts of his phone conversations recorded by law enforcement or Turkish intelligence,” he told Index. “They’ve also amassed his texts and WhatsApp messages. Other surveillance measures included secret photographs of him taken during meetings in public places, sometimes obtained via hidden cameras.”
This intrusion into Kavala’s privacy, Schenkkan believes, was purposefully planned to create an “enormous chilling effect” on all activists in Turkey.
“You have to be mindful that Kavala’s actions were extremely legal: organising training; applying for grants; emailing people about capacity building. After he was prosecuted, and others in his circle went into exile, there was a chilling effect in terms of how Turkish activists conducted their conversations.”
Over the last eight years, Schenkkan has noticed a shift in how Turkish activists talk to him in private settings.
“In even fairly private conversations they pay increased attention to ensuring the privacy of our communications,” he said.
“They move to different locations while talking, for example. I noticed some paranoid acts of caution that are not unjustified. When you learn that your fellow activists were under surveillance, and that their conversations were recorded, that changes the way you behave over time. If you’re a journalist, you may change the subject you report on. If you’re a researcher, you may change your research topic.”
Tarık Beyhan, a director at Amnesty Turkey, told Index he was concerned that the state could use Covid-19 to “normalise technologies threatening our privacy rights”.
He’s hoping the pandemic does not give a green light to expand digital surveillance. “We’re living in extraordinary times, but extraordinary times are the real test for government’s respect [for] human rights,” he said.
“Increased digital surveillance powers, like obtaining access to mobile phone location data, threatens privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association. They also pose a risk of harm to dissidents. Since 2016’s coup attempt, the government had been reluctant to relinquish its temporary powers. We mustn’t sleepwalk into a permanent expanded surveillance state now.”
For now, at least, we maintain some privacy and, as a result, Turks continue to debate and criticise government policies in private conversations.
“That is one of the most interesting things about the current privacy crisis,” Schenkkan said. “People don’t stop sharing their views. Some change their behaviour, but not everyone. There is a kind of resilience.”
And some, of course, have been amassing great skills at how to carve out as much privacy as possible away from an interfering state – skills that might be more useful than ever in the coming months.