"As Coronavirus surveillance escalates, personal privacy plummets," 23 March 2020

As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus — even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale... [R]atcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later.

... Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power. “We could so easily end up in a situation where we empower local, state or federal government to take measures in response to this pandemic that fundamentally change the scope of American civil rights,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project... Increased surveillance and health data disclosures have also drastically eroded people’s ability to keep their health status private.