By Steven Crook   

Privacy advocates in Taiwan are outraged over the government’s expansion of its “electronic fence” program to fight COVID-19, saying that it is open-ended and of questionable legality.

“It’s a combination of measures unknown to the public and media,” T.H. Schee, a blogger, consultant and government policy adviser, told Digital Privacy News. 

“There’s no transparency about the deployment of measures formerly used only by law-enforcement agencies when undertaking criminal investigations,” he said. 

The Taiwan government’s initial “electronic fence,” inaugurated last March, tracked those ordered to compulsory home isolation because of COVID by triangulating the person’s cellphone with base-station signals.  

By Matthew Scott

Last of two parts.

An effort to give consumers more protection over the use of their DNA was aborted last year when California’s Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA) was vetoed in September by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In a letter to the State Senate, Newsom argued that GIPA was too broadly written and risked “unintended consequences” that could “interfere with laboratories’ mandatory requirement to report COVID-19 test outcomes to local public-health departments, who report that information to the California Department of Public Health.”

California Senate Bill 980 proposed the most comprehensive DNA privacy protections of any legislation in the country, regulating how direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies could use, sell and share genetic information.

For the time being, Newsom apparently has decided that access to information that can safeguard the public health is more urgent than safeguarding individual’s privacy from law enforcement, insurers and marketers.

By Matthew Scott

First of two parts.

Debate over how DNA obtained by direct-to-consumer genetic-testing companies can be used likely will intensify after Blackstone, the New York private-equity firm, purchased Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion last month.

Privacy advocates told Digital Privacy News that, with the change of ownership, the 18 million people who willingly had given Ancestry.com their DNA could ultimately find that it had been used for purposes other than discovering family histories.

Those include being sold to law enforcement to help solve crimes, to pharmaceutical companies for DNA testing and to other companies for purposes that have not yet been realized.

Furthermore, the sale and resale of these companies raises concerns about who owns the rights to consumer DNA once it is submitted to a company for reasons unconnected to personal medical procedures.

By Robert Bateman

Police in England will receive the personal information of people told to self-isolate because of COVID-19, as part of a policy that aims to increase compliance with pandemic emergency laws.

But experts in epidemiology, social psychology — even policing — told Digital Privacy News that the practice ultimately could harm efforts to fight COVID.

“Collective pandemic response is completely dependent on public trust,” said Deepti Gurdasani, senior lecturer in clinical epidemiology and statistical genetics at Queen Mary’s University of London.

By Joanne Cleaver 

A home-based doggy boarding business nearly cost Dianna Sells her house.  

Sells didn’t realize that her retirement business of taking in sedate older dogs for short periods violated the rules and regulations of the homeowners association (HOA) in which her house is situated in Round Rock, Texas.

After all, her yard is big, the geriatric dogs were quiet — and many of her clients were neighbors. 

Then someone — Sells told Digital Privacy News she still doesn’t know who — complained to the association’s board.

By Joanne Cleaver

Fuse Financial Partners received a $150,000 potentially forgivable loan through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), created by Congress as part of the federal CARES Act.

And the whole world knows about it.

David Worrell, the firm’s managing partner, used the money as Congress intended: to continuing paying his 10 employees.

By Joanne Cleaver 

Tagged so they can be bagged.

Participants in the Republican National Convention next week will wear electronic “smart badges” that document their movements to speed contact-tracing should anyone subsequently develop COVID-19.

Some elements of the scaled-down convention will be held in Charlotte, N.C., Monday through Thursday. Attendees will be assigned badges that communicate with one another to document where the badge-wearers are, and who they move close to, within the confines of the location. 

By Myrle Croasdale

Employers can check employees’ temperatures, and they can require a COVID-19 virus test. Both as a condition for returning to work.

But what they can’t do, at least for now, is ask them to submit to a COVID antibody test.

In June, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) determined that under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an antibody test was a medical examination and that employees with these antibodies did not present a direct threat to others at work.

“The ADA at this time does not allow employers to require antibody testing before allowing employees to re-enter the workplace,” the EEOC announcement said.

The ADA governs disability-related inquiries and medical exams and prohibits employers from excluding employees with a disability from the workplace for health and safety reasons unless the employee’s health poses a direct threat to others.

“An antibody test at this time does not meet the ADA’s ‘job-related and consistent with business necessity’ standard for medical examinations,” the commission stated.

The key here, some experts told Digital Privacy News, is the “direct threat” issue.

By Samantha Cleaver

The Kentucky Department of Education released its plan last month to monitor attendance for this school year.

Instead of taking daily attendance in class, Kentucky districts will record student participation in the learning management system Infinite Campus.

As districts across the country announced plans for the 2020-2021 school year amid COVID-19, many — including large districts like Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C. — plan to start the year with virtual instruction.

This poses a challenge for how to track attendance.

By Sheryl Nance-Nash

It’s bad enough when you lose your job. Right now, though, chances are your bad luck may not end there.

Complaints of fraudulent unemployment insurance claims are spiking because of COVID-19, according to the FBI, and the claims use stolen personally identifiable information (PII).

In congressional testimony in June, Scott Dahl, a recently retired inspector general at the U.S. Labor Department, said that so far this year the agency was investigating more than 400 cases of unemployment insurance fraud.

By Linda Childers

As companies across the country gradually reopen in the wake of COVID-19, many have implemented safety protocols designed to keep employees healthy.

One technological solution being marketed to businesses are social-distancing and contact-tracing wristbands.

They are designed to enforce the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines of maintaining a six-feet distance from others to try to mitigate risks of contagion.

The wristbands might sound like a benign way to keep employees safe, but experts told Digital Privacy News that the technology might add another layer of surveillance to workplaces and could be used to penalize employees for spending the workday outside of designated areas.

By Joanne Cleaver

One of the first things Stephanie Genkin did as a new certified financial planner was establish her business-financial accounts separate from her personal accounts. 

That’s a proactive step she fears some last-minute entrepreneurs might overlook in the scramble to earn extra income to get through the economic crisis induced by the coronavirus pandemic. 

“No matter what deal you get for your personal finances, don’t mix that with business,” the Brooklyn-based planner told Digital Privacy News.

That goes for credit cards, bank accounts and, currently, loans through U.S. government programs intended to aid households and small businesses.

By Joanne Cleaver 

Digital giving has been heaven-sent for churches, which have been forced to pivot from on-site to online worship and community in the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in the process of shifting from cash in the collection plate to digital platforms, privacy has not always been a top consideration.

Churches are catching up as they abandon potluck privacy to the more stringent standards required by formalized digital transactions that are subject to financial regulations.

“Churches have rich information about members, from dates of birth to marriage status — information that advertisers would pay a premium to access,” Walle Mafolasire, founder of Givelify, a digital-giving platform for churches and nonprofits based in Indianapolis, told Digital Privacy News.