A Faustian Bargain Involving Privacy, Pandemic and a Functioning Economy

Will the price of controlling current and future pandemics be our privacy?  Will societies, at some point, be willing to strike a Faustian Bargain and give up their privacy in return for a functioning economy?  A Faustian Bargain is described by the encyclopedia Britannica as a "pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance for some material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches."  Some countries have already made that bargain, and as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, more societies will be forced to confront this decision.  

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, privacy looks to be one of the values required in the Faustian Bargain to keep an economy functioning.  The other option is to offer up life itself - a serious topic for another time.

South Korea, widely praised for their fast and efficient COVID-19 response and control, passed legislation in 2015 after a deadly MERS outbreak that gave government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card and other data from those who test positive to an infectious diseases.  They have now added a central tracking app called Corona 100m.  This mobile app publicly informs citizens of known cases within 100 meters of their current location.  Both of these examples are the result of a 2015 Faustian Bargain South Koreans made between privacy and pandemic control.

In China they are using mobile apps connected to government servers and tracking systems to dictate whether a person should be quarantined, allowed to ride subways, visit and shop at malls, work and be present in other public spaces.  A green badge on a mobile phone means the owner is symptom free, yellow means the person has had contact with an infected person and hasn't finished the quarantine period, and a red badge means the owner is confirmed to be infected, or has a fever or other symptoms and is awaiting a diagnosis.  Privacy advocates are quick to point out these mobile apps can be used by police, government agencies and other intelligence services for other forms of automated social control as well.

Raina MacIntyre, Emerging Infectious Disease scholar at the University of New South Wales lists the three actions societies must quickly employ to control a pandemic: instantly scale testing and diagnostic capacity, isolate those found to be positive, and track all of their contacts (and test/isolate).  This is a nearly impossible job to do during a rapidly expanding pandemic if you are using paper, pencil and other manual processes.

Smartphones with their mobile networks, apps, GPS, WiFi and bluetooth radios and other powerful utilities are amazingly powerful computers that can collect and spinoff all kinds of very useful data for those fighting and managing disease.  Many countries and people, however, are still not willing to make the Faustian Bargain between privacy, pandemic and a functioning economy. Perhaps we will someday find out if the saying, "Everything is for sale if the price is right," is a true maxim.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Silicon Valley Series: Customer Analytics, Personalization, Privacy and Context

In this Silicon Valley Series I was honored to interview a number of very smart and experienced Silicon Valley dignitaries on a variety of important business trends, technologies and strategies.  I hope you find this series of short interviews useful.

In this episode, I have the honor of learning from Silicon Valley veteran CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), brand and digital marketing expert, Mark Lewis (Twitter @marklewis_sf).  We discuss the latest trends and strategies in personalization, opportunities and privacy challenges.

Digital Hope and Redemption in the Digital Age

“You have a memory like an elephant,” is truly a compliment.  Researchers document all kinds of remarkable examples of the recall power of elephants, and this is credited with their ability to survive harsh environments as noted in this Scientific American article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elephants-never-forget/.

Our human memory also helps us learn from past experiences and mistakes, avoid recognizable hazards and keep track of our very busy lives.  Our memories for the most part have served us well, but the same might not always be said about digital memory in an always connected, real-time world. 

One of the most valuable concepts known to man is hope.  Hope is the belief that things can change and get better.  It is the belief that one can turn the page and start a new life.  It is the motivation that draws many to get out of bed each morning, recover from past mistakes, and go to work. 

Bankruptcy laws were designed, in part, to give hope. The Supreme Court in 1934 describes it this way, “It gives to the honest but unfortunate debtor…a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of preexisting debt.”  It gives debtors hope for a better future.  Source: http://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptcy-basics/process-bankruptcy-basics 

Today our second brains, the digital memory banks in the cloud controlled by programmed algorithms, don’t forget.  Algorithms are programmed not to forget our histories, our bankruptcies, our youthful indiscretions, our convictions, DUIs, our vices, our former lives.  They make it difficult to forget, transform into a better version and start fresh.

The more our lives, through digital interactions, are driven by and influenced by digital algorithms and second brains, the more important it becomes to consider the issue of digital forgiveness, digital redemption and digital hope.  Hope that in the physical and digital world, you have the opportunity to start fresh, and change your life for the better, unencumbered by your plethora of mistakes, digitally remembered, biasing the future.  Few of us, with the exception of Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, are the same person we were in our youth. 

I can think of many scenarios where a person may want to change his/her life and leave the past behind, but algorithms and second brains won’t let them, unless somebody programs them to forget.  If they are not programmed to forget, our digital interactions with websites, businesses, governments, police, search engines and match-making sites will hang-on to our past and use it to judge our present and future.  Where is digital forgiveness in the digital era?  Where is the ability to hope for a different and better life free from our past if algorithms are programmed to always reference, remember and judge based on our past?

Just because something is technically possible, does not automatically make it good or worthy.  We as humans must define how we want digital technologies to support the world and society we desire.  The Supreme Court in 1934 thought it was good and worthy to forgive and forget, to give people the “right to be forgotten,” in order to let a person start fresh.  I believe it is time to let people be digitally redeemed in a similar manner.  

The “right to be forgotten” concept has now been made into law in the EU, and variations of it have been implemented in other regions around the world. It was motivated by the desire for people to "determine the development of their own life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past.”  Read more herehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten.  

In Germany they have implemented a law titled the Federal Data Protection Act, or Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG).  The law is designed to protect individuals' personal rights from being injured through the handling or mishandling of their personal information.  

I believe the “right to be forgotten” is an important consideration and discussions. In a digital world fueled by data, capitalism is not a sufficient safeguard for our personal privacy and future.  We must imagine the world as we want it, and make it so as a society.

Hope is a critically important concept to humanity, and it must not be allowed to be stamped out by unbridled digital algorithms and second brains.  We must all recognize, in a digital age – that hope matters.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

1. Digital Transformation and the Role of Faster
2. Digital Transformation and the Law of Thermodynamics
3. Jettison the Heavy Baggage and Digitally Tranform
4. Digital Transformation - The Dark Side
5. Business is Not as Usual in Digital Transformation
6. 15 Rules for Winning in Digital Transformation
7. The End Goal of Digital Transformation
8. Digital Transformation and the Ignorance Penalty
9. Surviving the Three Ages of Digital Transformation
10. From Digital to Hyper-Transformation
11. Believers, Non-Believers and Digital Transformation
12. Forces Driving the Digital Transformation Era
13. Digital Transformation Requires Agility and Energy Measurement
14. A Doctrine for Digital Transformation is Required
15. The Advantages of Advantage in Digital Transformation
16. Digital Transformation and Its Role in Mobility and Competition
17. Digital Transformation - A Revolution in Precision Through IoT, Analytics and Mobility
18. Competing in Digital Transformation and Mobility
19. Ambiguity and Digital Transformation
20. Digital Transformation and Mobility - Macro-Forces and Timing
21. Mobile and IoT Technologies are Inside the Curve of Human Time

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.