La veille de la cybersécurité

The pandemic has put a spotlight on how big data and analytics technologies are being used in the public health sector. Contact tracing, where phone numbers and location data from mobile devices were combined with lab results in public health systems to issue alerts when an individual came in contact with a confirmed COVID patient. This information empowered people to preemptively self-isolate and/or head for rapid testing. Google and Apple, meanwhile, developed some groundbreaking application programming applications (APIs) for contact tracing that protected anonymity, while allowing their devices to receive updates from state disease surveillance systems and send out alerts. The use of big data during the pandemic is certainly a harbinger of things to come, and public health agencies must understand how such data is being used.