The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has transformed daily life for much of the planet has also altered the role of technology in wide-ranging areas.

Two of them that have seen particularly stark changes are data privacy and urban transportation. How those two fields will be reshaped is still a work in progress, but a clearer picture is beginning to emerge. They provide insight into how technologies can accelerate changes in society, business and everyday life when a crisis hits — and the legal and regulatory challenges they encounter in the process.

There’s a growing body of evidence that concerns around data privacy have marshaled a much larger constituency in favor of controls than previously existed one year ago. A tell sign for the developing sea change occurred near the end of January when Apple Inc. announced it would implement privacy changes in iOS 14 that force app makers to declare how collected data will be used, making it more difficult to target advertising at specific classes of users.

Google LLC has already indicated it will meet the requirements surrounding Apple’s new app-transparency policy. Facebook Inc., which stands to lose 7% of its revenue from the single change in iOS 14, is reportedly preparing a lawsuit against the iPhone maker.

There has also been a noticeable increase in regulatory activity. Voters overwhelmingly approved a measure in November to expand the California Consumer Privacy Act or CCPA, and 11 additional states have enacted data privacy laws within the past two years.

What has contributed to this burst of activity on the data privacy front has been the COVID-related use of technology to manage three vital areas of society: health, housing and childhood education.

The use of contact tracing apps to track and potentially control spread of the virus proved to be ineffective or problematic in many areas of the world, including some regions in the US where over half of people testing positive provided no details of contacts. In Singapore, reports emerged that contact tracing data was being used by police for criminal investigations.

The problem, in the eyes of data privacy experts, was a lack of transparency around how the collection of personal health data would be used.

“If you are asking me to compromise my privacy for the sake of safety, I want to know exactly how that data is going to improve my safety or the safety of my community, neighbors, friends and family,” Melanie Ensign, founder and chief executive officer of Discernible Inc., said during a presentation for the National Cyber Security Alliance’s Data Privacy Day in late January. “We have seen a shameful lack of that both from the company and the government side in explaining to consumers how their data and the balance with privacy actually leads to safety benefits.”

Evictions and child data protection

The economic impact of the pandemic has also triggered a sharp rise in evictions as renters and homeowners fell behind in payments. Despite a moratorium on evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year, more than 30,000 evictions have been filed by large landlords in the U.S. since September.

Sobering statistics such as those are placing greater scrutiny on the use of personal information by data brokers in a time of crisis that could disproportionately affect people hit hard financially by the pandemic.

“The simple fact of an eviction will be scraped by tenant screening companies,” Michele Gilman, professor of law at the University of Baltimore, said during a Data Privacy Day discussion. “Lenders and agencies will be penalizing people based on this digital footprint. Once the records are scraped by data brokers, it’s very difficult to put the cat back in the bag.”

Concerns around data privacy have reached into areas not previously thought to be a focus of significant concern. The shift of education from physical schools and classrooms to virtual platforms has led to heightened interest among parents about the collection and use of data generated by the online learning experience.

That was recently brought to light when Rebecca Richards, the privacy officer for the U.S. National Security Agency, noticed a consent form allowing the use of recordings by the school for “operational purposes,” with no protections for her children.

The NSA officer pursued her concerns with the school, which resulted in placement of significant limits around how data from online instructional sessions could be used. Her experience was documented in a blog post for the International Association for Privacy Professionals.

“The school ended up making pretty significant policy changes for how they were going to conduct the recordings,” said Brian Philbrook, lead privacy counsel at OneTrust LLC. “It was an opportunity to hash these things out and learn.”

More than 9,000 school districts have joined the Student Data Privacy Consortium, which works with educational administrators to negotiate privacy agreements with tech companies. The five-year old organization has experienced an increase in users of its service since the pandemic began.

Transformed commutes

There are also signs that the global pandemic has shifted the landscape around daily commute patterns in urban areas as many employees continue to work from home. That has suddenly put a tailwind behind the micromobility movement.

Micromobility represents the use of smaller forms of personal transit, such as e-scooters, e-bikes and mopeds, that were beginning to emerge in urban areas before COVID as alternative forms of transformation.

In a time when electric cars and even flying cars are garnering major headlines, the quiet emergence of space saving, affordable and socially distanced transportation options may become one of the major stories of the post-COVID era.

“Maybe people are paying attention to the wrong things,” said Oliver Bruce, an angel investor and one of the lead organizers behind the Micromobility World virtual event in January. “The vehicles that are the most interesting are the weird ones, the small ones. Those over time will not only become good, but massively better.”

Becoming massively better will require micromobility providers to overcome regulatory challenges while implementing new technology to handle a complex logistical network. Last week, micomobility startup Spin Inc. announced remote-controlled scooters which can be delivered autonomously to users on demand.

The camera-equipped three-wheelers are designed to simplify the process of renting a scooter and remove it from the sidewalk which has been a source of irritation for citizens and city authorities.

“This is designed to solve problems of sidewalk safety and clutter – what cities don’t like,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, co-founder and president of Tortoise Inc., provider of automated vehicle repositioning services, during a discussion at Micromobility World. “If we can just get all of the scooters away from the bars when it’s last call, that will remove a lot of vandalism.”

Window of opportunity

Even before the pandemic, there were signs that micromobility could have staying power. The scooter company Bird Inc. holds a singular distinction as being the fastest startup to reach a $1 billion unicorn valuation when its business took off in 2018.

Its competitor, Lime Inc., survived a 95% drop in ridership at the beginning of pandemic shutdowns and generated 100 million rides in the last 13 months after taking more than twice that period of time to generate the same amount when it started.

“COVID has put millions of commutes up for grabs,” said David Zipper, visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government. “What gets interesting is how you can change how people travel. It creates a window of opportunity for cities.”

Whether cities choose to embrace the micromobility movement remains to be seen, but some firms are taking a page out of Uber Inc.’s book and confronting regulatory resistance head-on. One of Bird’s early investors was political consultant Bradley Tusk, who pocketed $100 million from signing on in Uber’s early days to help the fledgling ride-hailing firm overcome attempts by cities to shut it down.

Tusk is now pursuing the same course on behalf of Bird, without having to confront an entrenched taxi industry or patchwork of existing laws. “If the law didn’t say we couldn’t enter the market, then we did,” said Tusk. “With scooters, it is a much newer product and there really is no regulatory framework in cities.”

The trends surrounding data privacy and micromobility highlight an important lesson emerging after a year of grappling with a global pandemic. Tech is woven deeply into the fabric of society and users are now making choices that will heavily influence, among so many other things, how personal information is collected and whether cars will continue to dominate the urban landscape.

“Technology itself is not neutral, it is socially embedded,” said law professor Gilman. “Please don’t assume that everyone experiences technology in cyberspace in the same way.”

Photo: Chris Yarzab/Flickr