The global COVID-19 pandemic has fostered unprecedented social and economic disruption, forcing most governments to introduce severe measures to contain the virus, such as travel restrictions, bans of public events, closures of non-essential businesses and transition to remote work and education.

To understand and respond better to the COVID-19 pandemic dynamics, countries worldwide are using data and statistics to drive mitigation and eradication-led strategies as well as forecast future pandemics and public health crises.

With an ever-changing data ecosystem, challenges posed by this global pandemic have accelerated the more extensive use of private sector data and intensified the need for improved data governance, principles and tools for data privacy protection.

Rapid deployment and adoption of self-reporting apps and data-analytic technologies to collect new data, use existing data in novel ways (e.g. symptom tracking, contact tracing, mobility and density mapping, quarantine enforcement, health and immunity passes), have raised deep concerns about surveillance tactics, privacy, personal data protection and civil liberties.

The increased speed of technological innovation and goal-directed processes reflect the acceleration of social change (e.g. cultural and institutional norms), and the pace of life affecting the tech industry, where speed acts as an important part of the business model, both among large tech companies and start-ups.

Rapid innovation is important in a crisis, not only so that companies can exploit market advantages in what author of The Shock Doctrine, activist Naomi Klein, also describes as ‘disaster capitalism’: in this context, life-, society- and economy-preserving solutions can be rolled out where needed.

Protecting privacy in the context of any crisis is complex. Risks of abuse, distrust and unaccountability in governments and in technology companiesdeveloping these tools and applications may arise and lead to a more fundamental question of whether the technologically enhanced forms of high-tech monitoring and surveillance products for COVID-19-related public health use may become a permanent part of the new normal.

The right to privacy is a globally recognised normative ideal ratified in international treaties and national constitutions. It is of particular importance for protecting global vulnerable and marginalised communities, particularly from small- and middle-income countries at highest risk for contracting and dying from COVID-19. There are reasons to be concerned that structural inequalities in data access and exposure to privacy invasion disproportionately affect disadvantaged societal groups.