Unnoticed by virtually everyone, as far as I can tell, is the yet another impingement on the control of one’s privacy by way of the Covid vaccine. At least here in Ohio, many of the sources of vaccinations are private pharmacies, not public hospitals. When I registered my mother (who qualifies for the 1B category of persons entitled to vaccines so far), I was required to enroll her in the “savings club” of the store in which the pharmacy was located. So, in order to get my mother life-saving treatment, she was forced to turn over data about her without compensation, let alone control.
Once again, a government ignorant about the ramifications of losing control of one’s private data has allowed that to happen. In this Age of Algorithms, where AI and algorithms work best if they have access to a variety of large databases, one’s personal data is one of the most valuable commodities we personally own. We would never allow a private operation to show up one day and say “Your back yard is a good place to store my industrial supplies–get out of my way and, oh, move your dog someplace else”. Worse, if we learned a government program had been set up to allow such property trespass, the citizenry would be protesting in front of City Hall by nightfall. So why should the government allow retailers to demand that senior citizens give away their personal information for free, and in fact be required to actually sign on to an activity that is meant to mine even more data about their buying habits? The government, instead, should be ordering these retailers to collect data only for purposes of setting up vaccination reservations, and proscribing the use of that data for any marketing or other use.
To make matters worse, the “Privacy Policy” of the establishment where my mother is registered is an oxymoron of contradictory legal clauses. The retailer states that it will only give my mother’s info to its vendors in a non-individualized format, but then states the vendors may “bring to” my mother offers for sales and marketing purposes. That means the vendors are getting not just anonymous demographic data about my mother, but rather her personal data tied to her address, phone number and email address. Otherwise, how are these vendors going to “bring” directly to my mother offers that are based on her demographics? So, the promise that her personal information will not be used is immediately superseded by the fact vendors may use her personal information. All of this data can be re-sold to third-party data aggregators multiple times, put into a database with unrestricted access by third parties, and otherwise used to label and categorize my mother literally forever.
Europe is well ahead of the U.S. on ensuring that individuals know how their data might be used, and preventing the exploitation of that data without individuals agreeing to that use. Americans should not be forced to choose between privacy and health. This vaccination effort could, on the other hand, be an opportunity to set a precedence whereby Americans are entitled to goods and services in the Age of Algorithms without both paying for those goods and services and handing over valuable data without proper compensation.
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