This article is adapted from a longer paper published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT)’s Digest section. To access the original paper, please visit JOLT.
By April Xiaoyi Xu
At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, China has successfully managed to contain the spread of the virus, due in large part to its technological strategy, which uses QR codes as a kind of health certificate.
These color-coded QR codes are automatically generated using cell phone data. Green indicates that an individual is healthy and can move freely, yellow signals that the user must quarantine for up to seven days, and red for fourteen days. The basis for these determinations, as well as the extent of the data collected in order to make them, remains opaque.