As the economies of some countries begin to normalize, the importance of striking a balance between contact tracing and protecting users' privacy is becoming ever-more urgent as COVID-19 continues to spread.

Some say there is likely to be another outbreak during the winter time, but this is a while away.

How can we make efforts to make sure that data are being collected exactly for public health use and will not be misused? CGTN Host Tian Wei spoke to Marcel Salathe, director of the Digital Epidemiology Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

Salathe said that data privacy is at the core of this debate, and there are two ways to approach the issue. One way is to use technology that draws a line in the sand. This technology can actually not be misused, although this is generally quite hard.

Salathe pointed out that "privacy by design" can be built into technology. For example, Apple and Google are releasing COVID-19 contact tracing API. 

Meanwhile, Salathe pointed out that the second approach is more on the political level, where even if people try to build the most privacy-preserving technology, there are ways that it can eventually be used for other purposes. For example, sometimes data can be stored for a long time. He believes that people have to come to a political agreement with all the actors involved.

Salathe takes Europe as an example: "It seems that there's a common agreement that this data will be very rapidly deleted after 21 days or so. Epidemiologically speaking, it really is not very useful anymore," But he emphasized that every country had to come to its own decisions about how this is done.

Yi Zeng, director at the Research Center for AI Ethics and Safety at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, told CGTN that in China, the Ministry of Transport, National Health Commission, and also Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a policy related to preserving personal privacy during the pandemic. The three departments agreed to coordinate with each other to protect the security of this data from misusing them or leaking to irrelevant people.

Zeng added that it is not rational to remove all data as it is necessary to keep it for some research purposes, so making sure what kind of research should be supported by using this data is of vital importance.

World Insight with Tian Wei is an international platform for debate and intelligent discussion. It is the meeting point of both the highly influential and rising voices, facilitated by host Tian Wei. It provides nutrition to form your own thoughts and ideas through a 45-minute live debate and interviews.

Schedule: Monday-Saturday
Time (GMT): 1415, 2015

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)