Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on our economy and social relationships. It has caused damages which are too many to be recounted. But as it has severely restricted our physical movement and interaction, it has severely compromised individual freedom.

In fact, the threat of infection and contagion being real, we have been forced to surrender it too abjectly. If the intentions of the governments that are keeping track of our movements were honest, or we could assume so, there would have been little reason for distrust.

Trouble is, the imperative to keep surveillance on its citizens is often the hallmark of an authoritarian state. For such states, with India betraying signs it may lapse into one, Covids-19 is an excellent ruse to keep a watch on its people and trample on their individual liberty.

A recent study came as an eye-opener. Professor Masooda Bashir and doctoral student Tanusree Sharma from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign recently analysed 50 Covid-19-related apps available in the Google Play store for their access to users’ personal data and their privacy protections.

According to the researchers ~ the study was published in the journal Nature Medicine ~ only a handful of mobile applications that track the spread of Covid-19 requiring access to users’ personal data indicate the data would be anonymous, encrypted and secured. Of the 50 apps the researchers evaluated, 30 require users’ permission to access data from their mobile devices such as contacts, photos, media, files, location data, the camera, besides requiring the device’s ID, call information, Wi-Fi connection, microphone, network access, the Google service configuration, and the ability to change network connectivity and audio settings, while some will collect users’ age, email address, phone number and postal code, the device’s location, unique identifiers, mobile IP address and operating system and the types of browsers used on the device.

That most of these apps are continuously collecting and processing highly sensitive and personally identifiable information, about health, location and direct identifiers like name, age, email address and voter or national identification of a user is worrisome enough.

“Healthcare providers must absolutely use whatever means are available to save lives and confine the spread of the virus,” they wrote, adding a cautionary note: “But it is up to the rest, especially those in the field of information privacy and security, to ask the questions needed to protect the right to privacy.” And thus unwarily we are submitting to the hidden stratagems, if any, while those with evil intentions are capitalising on our gullibility.

The World Health Organisation ( WHO) has asked national authorities to put in place robust surveillance to control the spread of Covid-19 and guide ongoing implementation of control measures. It called for strengthening surveillance capacities to rapidly identify cases of Covid-19, follow-up their contacts, and to monitor disease trends over time.

It advocated ‘comprehensive’ national surveillance for Covid-19 by reinforcing existing national systems and the scale-up of additional surveillance capacities as needed. All over the world and in countries like the US, the UK, China, India, Israel, and Singapore and throughout Europe, governments have gone overboard to collect data from CCTV cameras, cell phones and creditcard transactions in order to track infected patients, their movements and encounters.

Problem is that for countries with an authoritarian bent, the pandemic is a godsend to firm up foundations for a surveillance state and even seek popular justification for it.

This is not to say surveillance technologies ~ from biometric technologies at airports and borders, to video surveillance in schools, to radio frequency identification tags in hospitals, to magnetic strips used in departmental stores ~ are without any beneficial side. One cannot fault the deployment of techenabled surveillance infrastructure of Face Recognition Technology (FRT) based CCTVs, drones and cell phone tracking devices with a view to contact tracing and enforcing quarantine but the intent is often not as innocuous as it is made out to be. True individual freedom depends on the existence of a robust state dedicated to the public interest.

It is weakened when we ignore the continuing threat to liberal values and institutions at our peril. But liberalism tends to overemphasise the individual and devalue the community. Therefore, to integrate liberalism’s concern for the political rights and interests of individuals within the framework of a community is a delicate balancing act.

It calls for the individual and community to be reconciled in a way that creates the proper mix of liberty and authority.

Now, the state’s apparent concern for public well-being and interest of the community has seriously dented the balance between individual and community. Covid-19 has become the new 9/11 with even wider ramifications for individual liberty. The worry is that even after the passage of Covid-19, individual liberty will not be restored to the pre-Covid default mode. Restrictions will continue to remain in place and Big Brother will continue to watch us.

As Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems’ chief executive officer infamously said: “You have zero privacy anyway ~ get over it”.

The asymmetric relationship between the governments and the citizens makes the citizens vulnerable because governments exercise disproportionate power over citizens with whom they have an axe to grind. As the government is charged with protecting the rights of the individual as well as ensuring our collective safety, security and liberty form a zero-sum equation: to increase security is to decrease liberty and vice versa.

And this alibi, compounded manifold by the pandemic, now comes to perpetuate mass surveillance, justifying it first on security and now on health grounds. Nearly everything one does is being monitored and recorded by a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not.

Why is trust deficient? From suppression of key statistics to revision of GDP numbers, unemployment statistics and fiddling with budget numbers, the Central government’s data management has come under sharp attacks of economists and social scientists in recent times, and rightly so. Economic statistics are vital to public debate and policy making.

Be it Covid management, the number of PPEs, the capacity of our public health infrastructure, the number of active cases, deaths due to comorbid factors or accounting for Covid fatalities, the overall quality, reliability and dependability of the information is so poor and variable from agency to agency that for an independent researcher it is extremely difficult to sift through layers of opacity without being dangerously susceptible to bias and selectivity. For a long time, but more after the unfolding of the Covid pandemic, the prime casualty is data.

While transparency is very important in any public health campaign, the foremost example of which had been South Korea sharing every detail of how this virus is evolving, how it is spreading and what the government is doing about it, any perceived lack of transparency creates popular distrust in India. The same distrust leads many to believe that the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 currently analysed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) gives the government blanket powers to access citizens’ data.

The proliferation of surveillance technology without adequate institutional and legal safeguards is almost certain to be misused.

According to the findings of the UK-based research firm Compritech late last year, India ranks behind only Russia and China as one of the biggest surveillance states that indicate “systemic failure to maintain (privacy) safeguards.” The public health benefit of increased surveillance and the consequent loss of privacy during the pandemic notwithstanding, deployment of the newer tools for tracing and tracking of citizens’ movements in ordinary times by the government might well morph into an Orwellian nightmare ~ a digital system of social control to keep tab on its dissenters and renegades in real time.

The writer is a Kolkata based commentator on politics, development and cultural issues