Winnie Tang

Opinion | In an epidemic, can we balance personal privacy and public safety?

There are now 1.4 billion mobile devices in use in China, which means a lot of data that can be used to manage an infectious disease outbreak. Around the world, the use of big data is also becoming common in crisis relief, but fears about misuse remain

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Why you can trust SCMP

Winnie Tang

Published: 9:00am, 26 Feb 2020Updated: 10:54am, 3 Mar 2020

In times of epidemics, how are we to strike a balance between protecting personal privacy and maintaining public safety?

Today, more than five billion people in the world have mobile devices, and many of them can’t live without their phones. They represent a huge data pool that many researchers could tap to help manage an infectious disease outbreak, or locate trapped and injured individuals after an earthquake.

In 2017, GSMA, the association representing mobile operators worldwide, launched a “Big Data for Social Good” initiative that encourages telecoms groups to support responses to epidemics and natural disasters by sharing anonymised metadata.

More recently, media outlets looking to track the spread of the new coronavirus in and outside China used location data from tech giant Baidu’s map app to analyse the travel patterns of the 5 million people who left Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak, before it was closed off in January.

Now, experts such as Li Tie, chairman and chief economist of the China Centre for Urban Development, have advocated the use of big data to manage a crisis and reduce the risk of a future crisis.

As the Covid-19 outbreak intensified before the Lunar New Year holiday, China placed cities on lockdown and brought the economy to a virtual standstill. The epidemic is affecting sectors including catering, retail and tourism, and also hit Lunar New Year box office revenue. One analyst estimated economic losses reached 1 trillion yuan (US$143 billion) just in the first seven days of the holiday.