198. Sacha Molitorisz: Net Privacy

The priority for all of us at the moment is dealing with coronavirus. That’s our great challenge. As it happens, privacy is a big part of that.

The key question is: how do we balance public health and personal privacy? That is, how should the government and health authorities be able to access personal data and health data, while still respecting individual privacy, which is an integral component of our freedom? For instance, should the government be able to track people’s location data to stop COVID-19’s spread?

This isn’t the only way privacy has become highly relevant. Now that most of us are spending so much time at home, we’re increasingly living online. We’re working, socialising, shopping, entertaining ourselves through our smartphones, laptops and other connected devices. Just what data are Amazon’s Alexa, Facebook Live, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other digital platforms collecting? How are these platforms using it? Who are they sharing it with? And who else can access it?

As we respond to this pandemic, this is the perfect time to address these questions. The first priority is to deal with the virus. As we do so, we need to ensure that we enact laws and other protections that get the balance right, during the pandemic, but also when life returns to normal.

The aim of Net Privacy is to lay out a plan that can strike that balance. The books subtitle is, ‘How we can be free in an age of surveillance’. It obviously refers to freedom from unwarranted intrusions on our privacy. But we also want to be free from pandemics. The book was written before COVID-19. Still, it recognises that privacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but must be weighed up against other rights and interests. One step in this direction, it proposes, is for Australia to adopt legal provisions in line with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. Beyond this, the law ought to enact a series of privacy principles that get the balance right, for now, and for later.

The requisite balancing act is the focus of the following extract, where I build on Kant’s ethics and his idea of cosmopolitanism to argue for a globally-aligned approach to protecting privacy.