OTI Welcomes New York Law to Protect Health Data from Law Enforcement Access

In late December, Governor Cuomo signed the Contact Tracing Confidentiality Act into law, banning law enforcement and immigration enforcement officials from serving as contact tracers, or receiving and accessing information from contact tracing. This law also requires that information only be disclosed if necessary for public health purposes, and if the relevant individual provides a written, informed, and voluntary waiver stating the scope and limit of the waiver. New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) applauds this important new law, and urges other states to follow with similar measures to build trust in the COVID-19 contact tracing process.

A coalition of local and national advocates, including OTI, endorsed this legislation in July because it provides important protections to ensure that sensitive information remains confidential and protected from police and immigration officers. These crucial safeguards ensure increased public trust in contact tracing efforts, which will help both public health officials and New York communities alike. Allowing law enforcement access to contact tracing data would disproportionately impact communities of color, who are already over-policed, and could deter some individuals from partaking in contract tracing efforts, thereby limiting these efforts’ effectiveness.

Last year, OTI wrote a policy paper in collaboration with the Harvard University Safra Center for Ethics offering recommendations to mitigate the privacy, equity, and civil liberties concerns of using digital contact tracing tools. That paper included recommendations to limit the sharing of this sensitive data to public health officials only and take steps to build trust in communities, especially communities of color which have been heavily impacted by COVID-19. OTI, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and 83 civil rights, civil liberties, labor, and consumer protection organizations also created principles for pandemic response technologies to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of all individuals, especially communities of color and other populations vulnerable to coronavirus, including that tools should be used exclusively for public health purposes.

The following quote can be attributed to Christine Bannan, policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute:

“Privacy is essential to establishing the trust necessary for contact tracing to be effective. People will not participate in contact tracing if they fear it exposes them or their families to the risk of incarceration or deportation. OTI supports New York’s action to protect both the privacy and health of its residents.”