Their efforts have raised thorny, urgent questions about the balance between safeguarding privacy and protecting public-health in the midst of an historic pandemic. Absent strong protections, some policymakers said Americans simply would never grow comfortable adopting contact-tracing and notification apps at the scale that’s necessary to combat the coronavirus. The bill by Cantwell and her peers requires companies developing contact-tracing applications to do so in collaboration with public-health authorities. The bill, however, has troubled some privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who charge it suffers from significant loopholes -- such as exempting employers from new data-protection rules. ADADThe looming disagreements threaten to scuttle contact-tracing legislation much as it has past efforts on Capitol Hill to regulate online privacy.

Source: Washington Post June 01, 2020 18:33 UTC