net.wars

"Someone ratted me out," a friend complained recently. They meant: after a group dinner, one of the participants had notified everyone to say they'd tested positive for covid a day later, and a third person had informed the test and trace authorities and now my friend was getting repeated texts along the lines of "isolate and get tested". Which they found invasive and offensive, and...well, just plain *unreasonable*.

Last night, Boris Johnson casually said in Parliament that he thought we could end all covid-related restrictions in a couple of weeks. Today there's a rumor that the infection survey that has produced the most reliable data on the prevalence and location of covid infections may be discontinued soon. There have been rumors, too, of charging for covid tests.

Fifteen hundred people died of covid in this country in the past week. Officially, there were more than 66,000 new infections yesterday - and that doesn't include all the people who felt like crap and didn't do a test, or did do a test and didn't bother to report the results (because the government's reporting web form demands a lot of information each time that it only needs if you tested positive), or didn't know they were infected. If he follows through. Johnson's announcement would mean that if said dinner happened a month from now, my friend wouldn't be told to isolate. They can get exposed and perhaps infected and mingle as normal in complete ignorance. The tradeoff is the risk for everyone else: how do we decide when it's safe enough to meet? Is the plan to normalize high levels of fatalities?

Brief digression: no one thinks Johnson's announcement is a thought-out policy. Instead, given the daily emergence of new stories about rule-breaking parties at 10 Downing Street during lockdown, his comment is widely seen as an attempt to distract us and quiet fellow Conservatives who might vote to force him out of office. Ironically, a key element in making the party stories so compelling is the hundreds of pictures from CCTV, camera phones, social media, Johnson's official photographer... Teenagers have known for a decade to agree to down cameras at parties, but British government officials are apparently less afraid anything bad will happen to them if they're caught.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we wrote about the inevitable clash between privacy and the needs of public health and epidemiology. Privacy was indeed much discussed then, at the design stage for contact tracing apps, test and trace, and other measures. Democratic countries had to find a balance between the needs of public health and human rights. In the end, Google and Apple wound up largely dictating the terms on which contact tracing apps could operate on their platforms.

To the chagrin of privacy activists, "privacy" has rarely been a good motivator for activism. The arguments are too complicated, though you can get some people excited over "state surveillance". In this pandemic, the big rallying cry has been "freedom", from the media-friendly Freedom Day, July 19, 2021, when Johnson removed that round of covid restrictions, to anti-mask and anti-vaccination protesters, such as the "Freedom Convoy" currently blocking up normally bland, government-filled downtown Ottawa, Ontario, and an increasing number of other locations around he world. Understanding what's going on there is beyond the scope of net.wars.

More pertinent is the diverging meaning of "freedom". As the number of covid prevention measures shrinks, the freedom available to vulnerable people shrinks in tandem. I'm not talking about restrictions like how many people may meet in a bar, but simple measures like masking on public transport, or getting restaurants and bars to information about their ventilation that would make assessing risk easier.

Elsewise, we have many people who seem to define "freedom" to mean "It's my right to pretend the pandemic doesn't exist". Masks, even on other people, then become intolerable reminders that there is a virus out there making trouble. In that scenario, however, self-protection, even for reasonably healthy people who just don't want to get sick, becomes near-impossible. The "personal responsibility" approach doesn't work in a situation where what's most needed is social collaboration.

The people landed with the most risk can do the least about it. As the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy highlighted, the advent of the Internet has opened up a huge divide between the people who have to go to work and the people who can work anywhere. I can Zoom into my friend's group dinner rather than attend in person, but the caterers and waitstaff can't. If "your freedom ends where my nose begins" (Zechariah Chafee Jr, it says hereapplies to physical violence, shouldn't it include infection by virus?

Many human rights activists warned against creating second-class citizens via vaccination passports. The idea was right, but privacy was the wrong lens, because we still view it predominantly as a right for the individual. You want freedom? Instead of placing the burden on each of us, as health psychologist Susan Michie has been advocating for months, make the *places* safer - set ventilation standards, have venues publish their protocols, display CO2 readings, install HEPA air purifiers. Less risk, greater freedom, and you'd get some privacy, too - and maybe fewer of us would be set against each other in standoffs no one knows how to fix.

Illustrations: Trucks protesting in Ottawa, February 2022 (via ΙΣΧΣΝΙΚΑ-888 at Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.