ABSTRACT
Data privacy is a life-or-death matter when it comes to public health. From late fall 2019 until summer 2021, two series of events unfolded, one that everyone was talking about, and one that hardly anyone noticed. The most reported news story of that period related to the greatest world-health crisis in at least 100 years, the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, in a story that received next to no news attention, the Personal Data Protection Act Committee of the Uniform Law Commissioners in the United States was busy working on a new model law. By July 2021, each of these stories had reached a turning point. In the developed, Western world, most people who wanted to receive the vaccine against COVID-19 could do so, and nearly 60% of people in the United States had received at least one vaccine dose. Nevertheless, the COVID pandemic surged in late summer. Meanwhile, the Uniform Law Commission adopted the Uniform Personal Data Protection Act (UPDPA) at its annual meeting, paving the way for state legislatures to consider adopting the uniform act in 2022 legislative sessions. At roughly the same time, Virginia and Colorado state legislatures also adopted comprehensive data privacy acts …
Schmit, Cason and Larson, Brian and Kum, Hye-Chung, Data Privacy in the Time of Plague (November 20, 2021).
First posted 2021-11-30 16:20:35
Leave a Reply