How Big Data is Aiding the Coronavirus Fight

It was Monday on December 30th 2019 when Toronto-based startup BlueDot, a company that uses AI and big data to track and anticipate the spread of infectious diseases, noticed an anomalous strain of pneumonia cases near a wet market in Wuhan, China. Alerts were urgently sent out to its private and government clientele. The powerful AI warning system drew parallels between the Corona/COVID-19 epidemic and the lethal SARS outbreak in 2003 by filtering through thousands of articles and news reports. On January 30th 2020, a full month after BlueDot’s discovery, the World Health Organization officially declared the Coronavirus outbreak as a “public health emergency of international concern”; and only on March 11th did the World Health Organization characterize the outbreak as a global pandemic.

Big data, which is a component of AI, analyzes complex and existing data computationally to locate patterns and market trends, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions. Companies and various government sectors then use this data to explore and draw out meaningful insights to make decisions. Activities like watching a show on Netflix or tracking your heart rate on an Apple Watch are all data sets that can be collected and analysed with big data analytics. BlueDot, for example, used big data to track and locate where the infected might be travelling to by analysing global airline ticketing data. As a result, they were able to predict destinations such as Bangkok and Hong Kong that might have the highest risk of infection from the possible influx of Wuhan travellers. Big data is drastically improving the way we monitor and control diseases from spreading. However, concerns raised from lawmakers and civil rights organizations indicate the potential privacy risks when using big data, stating that data can easily end up in the wrong hands.

In China, big data is used extensively to monitor and track its current situation. Sophisticated facial recognition technologies and surveillance systems are being used to trace human interaction and movement. A temperature detection software developed by SenseTime is not only being used to detect if someone has a fever, but also used to predict and identify people who are most likely to catch the highly contagious disease. A monitoring system called “Health Code” issued by the Chinese government further extends its reach by using big data to analyse and envisage an individual’s risk of contracting the disease by tracking the individual’s travel history, personal interactions and location. A colour code of red, yellow or green is issued to each individual based on the severity of their situation or potential exposure to the disease. This information can be publicly accessed on popular mobile apps like WeChat and Alipay. All the technologies mentioned essentially collect and analyse every aspect of an individual’s life. Everything is digitally traceable through big data, posing a serious threat to private security.

The promising technology of big data used to combat the Coronavirus is definitely helping us monitor and control the highly contagious disease. With that said, big data also poses major downsides and potential dangers. First of all, the government and major companies involved in the fight against the coronavirus can access all your personal information every time you join a new server or give consent with the “I agree” option. The Chinese government may even be tracking and monitoring individuals’ personal data without consent. This poses a major privacy security threat as sensitive information such as social security data, credit card information or personal pictures can easily be leaked online if a corporation’s data security system is flawed or hacked. Since we generate so much valuable data every day, it has to be stored in a vast data storage. The data collected is duplicated across various locations in order to control space issues and ensure security. As a result, the prodigious amount of data attracts hackers and becomes untraceable and unmanageable across various locations. An example of this would be the major security breach at Facebook, where the data of 50 million of its users were compromised. The compromised data then becomes the hacker’s sole propriety, and may be used for malicious activities.

Many may argue that the data currently collected is solely ethical as it is used to fight the spread of the Coronavirus. However, there is no telling what else the government and tech companies are doing with the data collected. Even if the data is collected and used ethically, big data still violates our freedom of anonymity. Laws have yet to adapt to new technologies, especially data privacy and security, making regulations unclear and inefficient to prevent the use of data for malicious reasons. The major violations of privacy with big data can only be controlled if lawmakers truly understood the technology and negotiated with companies to implement harsher laws on the issue.

In our current highly technological society, governments and companies around the world are using advanced technologies to fight the urgent global epidemic. A major type of technology used is big data, which presents both advantages and dangers to our society. We should applaud the great efforts made by tech companies to prevent the further spreading of the disease, but we also need to acknowledge the details of which this technology entails on our private security. The ethical fight to stop the Coronavirus from spreading means that our data is collected for the greater good. However, until further laws or regulations are implemented regarding the usage of our data, we should always keep a vigilant eye on when, where and how our private data is being used.

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Works Cited

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"Coronavirus: How Artificial Intelligence, Data Science And Technology Is Used To Fight The Pandemic." Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/03/13/coronavirus-how-artificial-intelligence-data-science-and-technology-is-used-to-fight-the-pandemic/#72a482985f5f.

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