The Wall Street Journal - 28.03.2020 - 29.03.2020

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 |C3

From

solitary

reading

to online

book

clubs, we

will find

ways

to

satisfy

the

human

need for

stories.

Social distancing has brought quiet to our tables for now,

but we’ll find new rules for group eating.

The Return to

Dining Together

REVIEW | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

GETTY IMAGES

WASHINGTON’S POST-9/11 DEBATEabout

how much surveillance a free society

should allow has suddenly become about

much more than counterterrorism and na-

tional security. Amid today’s global pan-

demic, key technology companies are in

talks with federal and state governments

about employing their tools against

Covid-19. Facebook, which holds a trove of

geolocation information, is sharing dis-

ease-migration maps. Clearview AI, a fa-

cial-recognition tech firm, may be able to

track infected patients and identify people

they have met. Smart thermometers are re-

cording and transmitting fevers in real

time. The data firm Palantir

is working with the Centers

for Disease Control and Pre-

vention to collect and ana-

lyze vast information

streams.

All this and more, we

hope, will help to stop the

virus in its tracks, save lives

and help Americans get back

to normal. But such efforts—

done in haste—also raise searching ques-

tions about the balance between privacy

and public health. Decisions being made on

the fly by governments, private firms and

individuals will change the country’s digital

social contract for years to come.

China’s approach to monitoring its in-

fected citizens is famously authoritarian,

with a new app telling users whether they

can move freely based on a personal health

analysis—and, not incidentally, sharing

their location with the police. Citizens in

democracies would no doubt reject such in-

trusive measures, but the pandemic has

spurred key countries to consider new in-

fringements on privacy.

British officials, for example, hope to

roll out a new smartphone app that will

alert users who have come in contact with

an infected individual, using location data

drawn from GPS, Wi-Fi networks and even

Bluetooth beacons. A separate app, devel-

oped by researchers outside of govern-

ment, will map British infections and share

information with officials. Its developers

say the U.K. government can delete the

data at some point and pledge not to publi-

cize the movements of infected patients.

But South Korea has done just that. By

analyzing cellphone locations, CCTV feeds

and bank transactions, Seoul has estab-

lished a publicly available website that

tracks individual locations and contacts. In-

terested observers have already mined the

data to make guesses about who is visiting

“love hotels” and having affairs. Mean-

while, Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security

service has established a system that com-

bines individuals’ credit history with cell-

based location information—and works

even if a phone’s tracking is disabled.

These measures seem to help fight the

virus, and help right now is what we need.

If such steps do work, how much privacy

will Americans be willing to give up for a

better shot at dodging the vi-

rus?

Data is already used in

ways that many Americans

haven’t fully digested. For ex-

ample, information from fit-

ness trackers—which moni-

tor sleep patterns, heart

rates and location, among

other things—is already used

in personal-injury lawsuits,

criminal cases and divorce proceedings.

Today’s crisis is the new coronavirus,

but there will be a temptation to trade per-

sonal information for better health moni-

toring across a range of activities. Cardiac

signature recognition can detect heartbeat

patterns at a distance, which might help

doctors but could also be used to identify

individuals. DNA phenotyping may help

physicians prescribe more targeted treat-

ments but might also predict facial fea-

tures. Would any of this be fair game in the

next crisis?

To answer that, Americans will need to

know what data is going where, to whom,

for how long, for what purposes and how

all this will be overseen. Government offi-

cials and tech firms insist that their collab-

oration in the coronavirus fight will pre-

serve anonymity, protect civil liberties and

have an expiration date. But everyone is

moving fast. It’s not too early to look

closely at both the disease and the digital

treatments that officials are prescribing.

Ms. Cordero is a senior fellow and Mr.

Fontaine is CEO at the Center for a New

American Security.

Response to

the crisis is

recasting the

digital social

contract.

How much privacy will Americans be willing to give up

for a better chance of defeating the new coronavirus?

HealthSurveillance

IsHeretoStay

MITCH BLUNT

BYCARRIECORDERO ANDRICHARDFONTAINE

AT THE BEGINNING OF MARCH,I spent

a magical afternoon with a group of fel-

low food writers touring the markets of

Istanbul. Food writers are greedy people,

and as we walked through the jostling

streets, we shared bites of this and nib-

bles of that with each other, curious to

taste everything that the city had to of-

fer. The dishes were unbelievably good,

all the more so because of the way we

were sharing them from hand to hand.

It now seems almost miraculous to re-

member that the act of eating could have

been so free and trusting. Suddenly, the

idea of sharing food hand

to hand with a group of

strangers is off the table,

along with so many other

forms of sociable eating.

Our thinking about food

looks dramatically different

in the wake of the corona-

virus. Until recently, we

were living through the

most open and diverse era

of public eating the world

has ever seen. Never in human history

had there been such a variety of cafes

and restaurants, street food markets and

sushi joints, taco trucks and noodle

bars—all of them full of people inno-

cently enjoying delicious things with

friends outside of the home.

But social distancing has changed the

rules of eating. It used to seem rude to

refuse someone’s offer to share food.

Now, all of a sudden, the act of offering

food has become more complex, particu-

larly if the recipient is elderly or vulner-

able, although it’s reassuring to know

that so far, the evidence suggests that

Covid-19 is not spread through food it-

self.

Table manners have changed many

times before. Until the 18th century,

Westerners believed that eating with fin-

gers was more polite than eating with

forks. But never has there

been such a precipitous shift

in eating etiquette as the one

happening right now. One

day, people are making wry jokes on

Twitter about the coronavirus bringing

an end to the fashion for “sharing

plates.” A few days later, New York, San

Francisco, Paris and other cities famed

for their food have closed their restau-

rants to diners, and it’s unclear if so

many beloved businesses will recover.

Some of the ways that we have ad-

justed our behavior around food have

been welcome. It’s no bad thing that peo-

ple are finally starting to see they actu-

ally do need to wash their hands before

eating. For years, I have been nagging my

children to wash their hands before din-

ner, but it is only now that they under-

stand why it matters.

These anxious times

have also refocused our

minds on the sheer impor-

tance of food for our sur-

vival and well-being. Len-

tils and beans are suddenly

disappearing from store

shelves. The upside of self-

isolation, for many people,

is that it allows us to give

the preparation of meals

the time it deserves, at long last. Co-

cooned in the house for longer than

usual, I find myself turning back to long-

forgotten recipes for comfort.

What none of us knows right now is

how many post-coronavirus changes to

eating etiquette will be permanent. One

change I pray won’t last forever is the

erosion of hospitality, whether it’s dinner

in a restaurant or the easy charm of a

meal at home shared with friends.

In these times of life and death, many

pundits have started to describe eating

in company for pleasure, rather than for

mere survival, as something nonessential

and frivolous. It goes without saying that

we each need to do our part right now to

help get the pandemic under control. But

I yearn for the day when the restaurants

reopen and we once again trust each

other enough to eat from hand to well-

washed hand.

Ms. Wilson writes the Table

Talk column for The Journal.

Until now,

it used to

seem rude to

refuse an

offer to

share food.

Suddenly, the idea

of sharing food is

off the table.

BYBEEWILSON

IN A TIMEof social distancing,

when performances with live

audiences have been canceled

and even mingling together in

small gatherings is discour-

aged, writers find themselves,

surprisingly, at an advantage.

Ever adaptable, Homo sapiens

is also the storytelling species:

No matter the technology, no

matter the grimness of our

condition, we want to be told

stories. Whether the stories

are beautifully or crudely nar-

rated, whether they are uplift-

ing or tragic, whether they

bear a glancing relationship

with reality or are entirely

fantastic—this scarcely mat-

ters: We need stories, and we

will have them.

While other activities are

likely to be radically changed,

the reading experience is not

likely to change significantly.

Bookstores may be closed to

BYJOYCECAROLOATES

JAMES YANG

readings there are many who

are just as happy to remain in-

visible. To many writers, not

being expected to go on book

tours and to give public read-

ings may come as a relief.

In a time of

social

distancing,

writers find

themselves

at an

advantage.

live customers but

are still taking or-

ders for wares

which may be

mailed for no

charge or, inge-

niously, even picked

up at curbside; e-

books and audiobooks

may be downloaded from

public libraries.

Authors have always felt a

certain distance from their

printed work. Manuscripts are

written, revised, proofread and

further revised. By the time a

book is published, which is

likely to be a full year after the

manuscript is handed to the

publisher, the writer has had

the opportunity to rethink each

word. Unlike artists who are

best appreciated performing in

“real time,” and most inspired

by live audiences, writers and

poets quite naturally fade into

their handiwork. For every

poet who delights in public

New Forms of

Storytelling—and

Old Ones Too

Online, poetry has been

thriving for years. Long before

our current crisis, Emily Dick-

inson has been ubiquitous

there, as well as Sylvia Plath,

more popular than even the

gregarious extroverts Walt

Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.

Each morning the Poetry

Foundation posts poems for

readers who, like me, are

grateful to have poetry so

readily available and confident

that, though we may be wast-

ing our precious work time, it

is probably more productive to

be reading poetry.

Book clubs have prospered

in America for decades. In our

new, fiercely self-protective

world, their meetings can eas-

ily be accommodated by Skype

or Zoom. Soon after the

Covid-19 crisis shut down

much of our cultural life, the

literary magazine A Public

Space initiated a communal

reading of Tolstoy’s “War and

Peace” under the aegis of the

novelist Yiyun Li, with the in-

tention of lifting spirits and es-

tablishing a common bond

among lovers of good litera-

ture. A friend has just invited

me to participate in a virtual

“tea ceremony”—a first in my

experience.

For many Americans, this

transition to a monastic pri-

vate life, a retreat from other

people, especially large gath-

erings, may come to seem

normal, as in a science fiction

dystopia where individuals

live out their lives in seclu-

sion, oblivious of the alterna-

tive life which was once so

cherished and, through some

fluke of nature or a tragic er-

ror of failed leadership,

squandered and lost.

Ms. Oates is a novelist, short-

story writer and essayist.