COVID-19 Surveillance
Every day a new government or private sector initiative is announced that uses trace data from social or cellphone networks to address COVID-19 in real time or to better understand its spread or the impact of policy decisions to date. There are ongoing debates about the desirability, legality, and disparate impact of various efforts. In this discussion I would like to step back and consider this as an example of an emerging private sector research infrastructure — first really brought to light by the Facebook emotional contagion study — and consider its normative and practical implications for the research community and the public. Join us for a conversation.
Deirdre K. Mulligan is an associate professor at the School of Information and the associate dean and Head of School. Her research focuses on the intersections between law, policy, information science, ethics, and data science. Mulligan is a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, a faculty advisor to the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, and co-director with associate professor Jenna Burrell of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG), a group of UC Berkeley faculty, postdocs and graduate students that engage with the social and political implications of integrating machine learning systems into society. Before coming to Berkeley, Mulligan helped found the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).
Mulligan’s research spans the fields of privacy and cybersecurity regulation, administrative law and “new governance,” and the growing interdisciplinary field of values-in-design. Her book Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe (MIT 2015), co-authored with UC Berkeley law professor Kenneth Bamberger, a comparative analysis of the interaction between law and corporate privacy practices in five countries, received the 2016 International Association of Privacy Professionals Leadership Award.
