Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images AsiaPac

The Covid-19 pandemic is in many ways an informational problem. Who’s carrying the virus right now? Am I in range of their aerosol exhalations? Who’s already had it? Do their antibodies make them immune? If I test positive, how can I alert all the people who’ve been near me? And what, by the way, should those people do with this knowledge?

So information is one key to controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2. That’s good news, because we happen to live in a time when we’re able to gather and use data in ways our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. Nobody during the bubonic plagues of the Middle Ages or the Spanish Flu of 1918 thought: “I bet there’s an app for that.”

But, for the whizzbang digital tools currently being developed to work, people must actually download and use them. That means they must trust these apps. So digital surveillance — which is what we’re talking about — must be in harmony with our social values. And those vary across the world.

What, then, are the main “data cultures” to choose from?

At one extreme, there’s what I’ll label the American approach, although it’s really a caricature of Silicon Valley and its idiosyncratic mix of tech-utopianism and libertarianism. Here, user data is generally assumed to be free by default — for use by the private sector. Companies like Google parent Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. collect our data to optimize search results, say, or to sell better ads. The government can have the information only if it’s going after crime or terrorism, or something else defined in law, possibly including a virus.

Another extreme is the Chinese approach, which I’ll call Confucian authoritarianism. Here, even if data is harvested by “private” companies like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. or Tencent Holdings Ltd., it’s assumed to belong to the state and the party. This information includes everything from people’s movements to their digital wallets, body temperatures and facial scans. All this can be weaponized by the authorities to clamp down on entire populations, such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang. But it can also be mobilized against an epidemic.

Yet another extreme is the German approach, which I’ll call post-traumatic technophobia. Here, data is assumed to be inherently dangerous, and thus in need of special protection. After all, just imagine what the Nazi Gestapo or the East German Stasi would have done with such information. So data belongs entirely to the user, who must actively consent whenever anybody, private or public, wants it.

I’m using these caricatures as archetypes, because in the current emergency they’re all being scrambled, as countries concoct their own mixtures. And the most interesting hybrid models are in East Asia.

Two of the most successful countries in containing Covid-19 so far have been South Korea and, at least initially, Singapore, with approaches that mix the American and Chinese data cultures. I’ll call them “Confucian-democratic,” because they place the public good above individual rights and privacy, but with the consent of the population.

In South Korea, for example, private developers quickly built contact-tracing apps. But the authorities also use footage from CCTV cameras and credit card transactions to track the movements and encounters of potential carriers, up to and including their trysts in “love motels.” People in quarantine are monitored via their mobile phones, in a form of house arrest. Polls show that South Koreans approve of these measures. But in Western countries, this won’t fly.

That’s why the most successful data model in the world so far is not South Korea or Singapore but Taiwan. For lack of a better term, I’ll call its approach “participatory self-surveillance.” Like South Korea, Taiwan enforces quarantines with cellphone tracking and has stitched together various government databases, such as travel and health records. But Taiwan and its people added a twist.

In effect, the whole country voluntarily partnered with the government to create a protean network of databases in which information flows both from the bottom up and from the top down. To make new online and offline tools for fighting the virus, “hacktivists,” developers and citizens have been collaborating with the government on vTaiwan, a sort of online democracy town hall and brainstorming site. One tool, for example, prevented a run on face masks by mapping where the stocks were and allocating them wherever they were most needed. By involving people in the solutions, rather than just dictating policies to them, the process is transparent and inspires trust, even civic pride.

It remains to be seen whether Taiwan’s model is exportable. Considered a renegade province by China and thus excluded from membership in the World Health Organization, the island has since the 1980s turned from a dictatorship into one of the world’s most vibrant democracies. It’s neither polarized and dysfunctional like the U.S., nor bureaucratic and calcified like the EU. The closest European comparison might be Iceland, which, not coincidentally, has a voluntary contact-tracing app, called Rakning C-19, that’s achieved the greatest population penetration in the world, about 40%.

But other countries should at least consider the Taiwanese approach, if only because the alternatives are worse. The American model, though masquerading as free, is ultimately elitist, imposed by a tech aristocracy on populations that are often digitally and medically disenfranchised. The Chinese model is inherently illiberal and disdains individual dignity and freedom. The other Confucian models, like South Korea’s, are too collectivist for Western sensibilities. And the traditional German/European data angst is paranoid and barren.

Classical liberals like me must accept that we cannot reject a technological quantum leap on the grounds that it might deprive us of liberty. That’s because during a pandemic, the alternative is interminable lockdowns, which rob us of even more freedom. We should also concede that the new tools can’t always be voluntary and anonymous. To contain outbreaks, apps must cover at least 60% of the population; to prevent infections, they must give information that is specific.

But we should insist that we understand what happens to our information, and for how long. Better yet, as in Taiwan, we should participate in capturing, using and protecting the data in the first place. After all, it’s ours; we’re just sharing it temporarily to keep ourselves and others safe.

To contact the author of this story:
Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nicole Torres at ntorres51@bloomberg.net