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To Fight Coronavirus Spread, Israel Is Using Cellphone Technology

(Fox News) Prof. Eugene Kontorovich - Israel's government this week approved the use of people's cellphone location information to help battle the coronavirus epidemic. This has raised serious - and legitimate - concerns about privacy and governmental intrusion in the form of unseen surveillance. Placing such sweeping data about people's movements in the hands of the government is not to be taken lightly. But in an epidemic or pandemic where strong public health measures are required, some rights will inevitably be restricted. Measures like Israel's can, on balance, be a lesser evil for individual rights. If they help contain the spread of the disease, they save lives and reduce the scope and duration of far greater restrictions, like quarantines. Israel is using cellphone data to find out who a coronavirus patient may have exposed to the virus when asymptomatic. The vast trove of metadata allows public health workers to see where the patient went and what other cellphone users were in the same place. Those people can then be warned, limiting their unwitting ability to pass on the virus. The broad use of cellphone data to track the movements of people infringes on the privacy of individuals and should not normally be tolerated. But the particular circumstances of a contagious and life-threatening pandemic make this an appropriate response. Individual rights cannot come at the expense of others' rights. Individual rights are not absolute when their exercise creates significant risk for others. That is why measures are permitted in such circumstances that would otherwise be unthinkable. The writer, a professor and director of the Center for International Law in the Middle East at George Mason University Law School, is also a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem.
2020-03-19 00:00:00
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