At the start of the pandemic, technologists and policymakers touted the promise of technology to track and warn individuals of potential COVID-19 exposure and high-risk areas. But whether due to overburdened contact tracers or the lack of early and coordinated adoption, those technologies never became a central part of the public health effort against the disease.

With attention now on various schemes for “vaccine passports,” a concept posing threats to privacy and other civil liberties, and as the country nears one in five adults fully vaccinated, civil society, policymakers, and the public must remain wary of efforts to cement health and contact-tracing apps into everyday life, and continue to ask targeted questions of their use.

If not, such health surveillance apps — justified as necessary to monitor lingering cases, verify vaccination and health status for travel, and predict future outbreaks — may well become a lasting and increasingly invasive feature of public life.

Since the outbreak of the virus, at least 24 states and Washington, D.C. have rolled out exposure notification apps through Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification framework, GAEN (using Bluetooth signals and randomly generated keys to track possible exposures), and Exposure Notifications Express (allowing public health authorities to access the framework without maintaining or building their own app). These tools are more privacy-protective than other location-based tracking proposals we have seen. Save for a few worrying instances, the vast majority of state contact tracing apps have remained voluntary and largely developed through GAEN, something many other countries cannot say.

Still, several privacy-violative deployments in the U.S. should not be replicated. In North and South Dakota, the developer of the states’ Care19 app — designed to “anonymously” cache locations visited by users for more than ten minutes — was found to have secretly violated its own privacy policy by sharing users’ location data and personal identifiers with third-party apps, including Foursquare. In Utah, a $2.75 million app called Healthy Together, touted to utilize GPS and Bluetooth to augment contact tracing, became largely “a waste” three months after its launch when state officials shut off the location tracking feature because of widespread refusal to download the app.

College campuses were home to some of the most egregious cases of technology-assisted contact tracing, reflecting administrators’ wide latitude to effect mandatory policies as well as the influence of aggressive tech company marketing on unwitting administrators. At Michigan’s Albion College, a mandatory app called Aura used real-time location tracking to ensure students never left grounds, nor switched off their location — and, if they did, were locked out of buildings and faced suspension. One savvy student looking into the app’s source code found the security keys to the app’s backend servers, revealing students’ names, addresses, test results, and dates of birth.

Other schools like Harvard University and University of California, Irvine have used Wi-Fi tracking to monitor students’ movements and crowd flow. As a general rule, the use of location tracking is extremely problematic. It is both insufficiently accurate for contact tracing and violates the Fourth Amendment when used by law enforcement without a warrant.

We were also unhappy to see policies like those at James Madison University that mandated the use of tracking apps. With no formal appeals process, students and faculty could be reported to campus police and academic heads for failing to pass a five-question symptom survey, and campus community members were encouraged to inform on one another regarding suspected violations. Beyond being an instance of health theater, such coercive policies heavily incentivize false responses and risk being disparately enforced.

We’ve also seen the deployment of facial recognition and physiological surveillance on some campuses to fight COVID-19. Molloy College, for example, installed face recognition temperature kiosks, despite the technology’s highly dubious effectiveness, placing them in central campus buildings and dormitories and linking them to campus identification systems. The University of Southern California, one of the earliest campuses to adopt fingerprint scanning technology for access to certain campus buildings and dorms, recently replaced them with mandatory facial recognition scanners. In Michigan, Oakland University has distributed a wearable device, known as the BioButton, with a 90-day battery life to continuously log skin temperature, respiratory rate, and resting heart rate. Although voluntary, the technology is an example of continuous surveillance hastily implemented, without large-scale testing or FDA certifications as to effectiveness — and which puts the burden on students to ensure their private health information is expunged from third-party company records.

Though these instances of campus and state overreach are far from the norm, overbroad efforts to curb and track COVID-19 leave the door open to an abiding surveillance apparatus that won’t be dissolved once the public emergency dust settles. As the Biden administration looks into the interoperability of contact tracing apps, tech companies like sp0n — the creators of the controversial neighborhood safety app Citizen — are partnering with cities for digital contact tracing, while others investigate how contact tracing apps might double as digital immunity and vaccination passports for global travel.

As always, we ought to remain open to creative and privacy-protective ways of using technology during disease outbreaks. Concurrently, we have a duty to ensure that temporary COVID-19 data surveillance infrastructures do not take hold to outlast the effects of this once-in-a-century pandemic.

This op-ed was first published in The Hill

Let’s say you are the governor of Florida and are being accused of tragically botching the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. You are also being blamed for the absolute chaos Floridians encountered when they tried to receive desperately needed unemployment benefits, as well as maddening delays in vaccine distribution.

How did this happen? At the outbreak of the pandemic, you chose to follow the lead of then-President Trump, his reckless denial of science and failure to provide hands-on leadership.

So, what do you do to address this crisis moment in the midst of the worst health emergency in 100 years?

If you are Gov. Ron DeSantis you make your legislative priority for 2021 the passage of a law that will criminalize political protest. You champion House Bill 1/Senate Bill 484, which will make it child’s play to shut down any protest you don’t like, including those calling for you and your allies in the Florida Legislature to be voted out of office for your failures during the pandemic, among other reasons.

How easy will it be to stifle political protest in Florida if this new law passes? This easy: Under the new law, if a thousand people are marching peacefully to protest the current leadership, all it will take is for a handful of people to decide to throw a brick through a shop window and the entire crowd will be subject to arrest, a felony conviction and a hefty fine if law enforcement deems the peaceful protest “a riot.” That brick thrower could be an infiltrator acting to deliberately derail a perfectly legal demonstration.

And to make sure that peaceful protesters can’t continue demanding change, they will be denied bail until they see a judge. That’s right. You don’t have to commit a crime yourself or engage in any disorderly and violent conduct; you just need to be exercising your constitutional right to peaceful protest while someone else — with no connection to you — is engaging in such conduct.

Will police and local elected leaders shut down a protest as quickly as that? There’s a good chance they will, and here’s why. DeSantis’ bill states that if they don’t, the city itself can be held liable for any amount of personal injury or property damage. This is a radical change in the law, which currently protects municipalities from such sweeping liability, and it will drive local officials to over-militarize their law enforcement response to peaceful protests in an attempt to avoid costly civil litigation.

But how about if no one throws a brick through a window? How about if people with different political positions just yell at each other on the street? No problem, the DeSantis law takes care of that too. The proposed law: “Creates the crime of mob intimidation, prohibiting a mob from forcefully compelling or attempting to compel another person to do any act or to assume or abandon a particular viewpoint.”

In other words, if you and a few friends raise your voices during a political argument with a counter protester you may end up in jail. Who will end up being accused of this? Black people will be disproportionately impacted and arrested. After all, DeSantis first proposed this law in September during the Black Lives Matter protests against the police killings of Black people.

Law enforcement already has laws on the books that impose substantial penalties on people committing such crimes. Those laws were enforced last year against the trivially small number of people who broke the law during protests in Florida. Some courageous law enforcement leaders are already saying as much.

Let’s get our numbers straight. As of Mar. 1, 28,933 people had died from COVID-19 in Florida. Not one person died during last year’s political protests, 98 percent of which involved peaceful protesters.

No matter what DeSantis says about the purpose of this law, if it passes it will be on the books ready to be used during next year’s election campaigns and against protesters calling for him to be voted out of office for his tragic failures during the pandemic. This law will also be used to shut down protests against police violence and failures to confront climate change, or to stifle marches in favor — or opposition — of abortion access and LGBTQ rights. You name it.

Giving those in power the ability to quash dissent is perilous, extremely unwise, and profoundly un-American.

Micah Kubic is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida.