Privacy and Pandemics

Abstract

The beginning of 2020 marked an unexpected turn for the world, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has affected every aspect of life. It has also created an unprecedented opportunity for governments to justify the expansion of their surveillance and collection of data. The foregoing essay, which was first published in Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive of the Columbia Law School focuses on two types of data collection – governmental mass collection of nonanonymized location data and state-collected nonanonymized data on people’s health and immunity status. Several countries have applied one or both practices and it is relevant to look into them with legal perspective. Georgia is one of the countries, that also uses technology for the purpose of locating the possible contacts of the virus infected people, thus making the comparative analysis extremely relevant locally as well as globally.

Keywords

• emergency powers
• data privacy
• pandemic
• constitutional law