Press

The verdict was in, and it was a comforting one: Deepfakes are the “dog that never barked.” So said Keir Giles, a Russia specialist with the Conflict Studies Research Centre in the United Kingdom. Giles reasoned that the threat posed by deepfakes has become so entrenched in the public’s imagination that no one would be fooled should they appear. Read more about All’s Clear for Deepfakes: Think Again

"But even if enough people opted in to the system and chose to faithfully report their own infections and comply with self-isolation, plans like Google-Apple's would likely have so many false alarms and missed exposures that people would lose faith in them, says Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington Law School and co-director of the school's Tech Policy Lab. "They just wouldn't be effective, and in fact could do more harm than good."" Read more about Would You Let The Government Track Your Smartphone If It Meant We Could Reopen Sooner?

""People need to be confident that the software on their phones is behaving as advertised," Marshall Erwin, senior director of Trust & Security at Mozilla, told CIO Dive. The open source nature of Apple and Google's app will allow for independent reviews." Read more about Privacy vs. public health: Where contact tracing fits

"Digital contact tracing is no substitute for human health care workers and medical testing, cautions Margaret Hu, an associate professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. “If you don’t have widespread testing, and if you don’t have accurate testing,” she says, “are you, through this warning system, going to have a very large rate of false warnings or under-warnings?” Read more about Free movement or privacy? Pandemic forces new trade-offs

""If this becomes a mechanism to move more and more of the internet toward one single set of rules, that's a real loss," said Daphne Keller, platform regulation director of Stanford's Cyber Policy Center.

"And there are many reasons to be skeptical of such a system, said Jennifer Granick, the ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel. Tracking technology can be very inaccurate and discriminatory, she warned, and access to these devices can further exacerbate existing inequities in income and social status.

“Don’t believe that technology is going to swoop in and solve all our problems,” Granick said. “There’s hard work to be done.”" Read more about How contact tracing can help the U.S. get control over coronavirus

Catherine Crump is the director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, where she researches the impact of new technology on civil liberties and the justice system. Among many other subject areas, she’s done research on the automatic license plate reader, a device that converts images of license plates into readable text to give the police more accurate location information on the people they’re monitoring. Read more about Q&A: Cameras, Police, the Dangers of a Constantly Monitored Society

"“It’s absolutely a way to leverage the technology in phones in a way that will benefit public health,” says Northeastern University law professor Woodrow Hartzog, who specializes in privacy and data protection law. Read more about Mobile apps may help track the spread of COVID-19, but at what cost to data privacy?