Michele Bratcher Goodwin of UC Irvine School of Law and the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy was featured on an episode of At Liberty, a weekly podcast from the ACLU that explores the biggest civil rights and civil liberties issues of the day.
The episode, “A COVID-19 Balancing Act: Public Health and Privacy” addresses concerns and questions public health officials may face regarding privacy and civil liberties in the use of technological solutions in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
From the episode description,
Over the next month, states will start to loosen their COVID-19 stay-at-home restrictions. Some of us will return to work, gather in small groups, and maybe even dine at a neighborhood restaurant. But what will it take to keep us safe and prevent new spikes in infections? Many experts say we will not be out of the woods until there's a vaccine, but how would a national vaccination plan even work? At the same time, technological solutions are being proposed, especially related to contact tracing, the process by which public health officials can map and anticipate the spread of a virus, but technological solutions raise a whole host of questions on their own regarding privacy and civil liberties. Today we're joined by professor Michele Goodwin, the founding director of the center for biotechnology and global health policy at the University of California Irvine school of law, and ACLU staff attorney Jennifer Granick who leads our work on surveillance and cybersecurity.