The first thing to see the door in times of emergencies are civil liberties. When the emergency is health related, especially a pandemic with the potential to kill millions of people, the means definitely seem to justify the ends. If one is to place privacy and civil liberty on one side of the scale, and death by pandemic on the other, it is no surprise which side would weigh more.
As several countries like China, South Korea, and Israel are using technological surveillance to combat covid19, as USA engages in discussions with Facebook and Google on ways of tracking and monitoring people to contain the spread of the disease, the ethics of surveillance becomes all the more important.
As Electronic Frontier Foundation says, the risks are the usual ones:
I do see the point here. If it is a choice between government having access to my data or me being responsible for the death of hundreds of people however circumstantially, I would give up my privacy rights. However, the issues lies in that there is no guarantee it will end there. We have no assurance that
1. the governments will stop surveillance, and worse
2. the governments would not use the data for other purposes, and worst
3. the governments, now that they know of the possibilities, would not create any excuse to reinstate these surveillance regulations under other circumstances
If there is one thing we know, it is that our governments cannot be trusted, their morality is questionable, and power corrupts. Ultimately, it is a coin toss between what is more valuable: human life or privacy; in asking this question, though, we are painting over the real question that is beneath this one: human life in the short-run or human life in the long-run.
I do not have an answer.
References:
Wired
The Guardian
Reuters
The New York Times
Minoli Wijetunga 