Reforming Privacy Law in America: A Comparative Analysis on Digital Contact Tracing Data and Its Implications in the Age of COVID-19

The novel coronavirus was a public health emergency that impacted the world throughout 2020. Governments and health officials faced monumental problems that often demanded monumental solutions to help curb the spread of the virus and save lives. State and local governments followed other nations and pursued technological solutions to conduct contact tracing more efficiently and attempt to outpace the spread. Some pursued digital contact tracing apps, including centralized and decentralized, to track the spread via Bluetooth or GPS and alert possible contacts. Others conducted manual contact tracing and directly telephoned the possible contacts. Each of these methods has its own variety of applicable laws that affect how the data is stored and gathered. While these tools may have provided large utility for governments and the public, these tools brought into the light the deficiencies of sector-based privacy laws in the United States.This Article evaluates the privacy issues in human and digital contact tracing in the United States through several bodies of laws, including international laws, federal laws and regulations, federal agency guidelines, Supreme Court privacy cases, and state laws. Understanding that there exists holes in the current United States privacy framework, this Article calls for legislation to reform current privacy laws that were designed for a world of paper records . This Article proposes Congress and the Executive Branch to emulate its existing laws and regulation to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which can prospectively increase privacy protections for new and upcoming technologies like digital contact tracing apps.