The Public Is Being Misled by Pandemic Technology That Won’t Keep Them Safe

Technology like thermal imaging is little more than security theater

Passengers of the metro are captured by thermographic or body temperature measurement cameras, in response to find those possibly infected with the coronavirus, in Panama City, on April 21, 2020. Photo: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images

This op-ed was co-authored by Evan Selinger, professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Brenda Leong, senior counsel and director of A.I. and ethics at the Future of Privacy Forum.

The lockdown on commercial industry and personal activity in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic has been in place for almost two months in many parts of the U.S. Due to financial desperation and frustration with isolation, nonessential businesses are starting to reopen and more people are going out in public despite ongoing health concerns.

Seeking to frame this economically driven agenda with a veneer of public health responsibility, governments and businesses are implementing a variety of precautions, including using thermal imaging cameras to detect elevated skin temperatures. Unfortunately, the use of this technology, like some of the others in the pandemic response kit, is “security theater,” to use a term coined by the security and privacy expert Bruce Schneier. It’s a dangerous, possibly life-threatening mirage that looks like strong leadership but, in fact, shimmers over empty promises that inspire false confidence about personal health and safety.

Schneier has been warning us for years of this kind of facade, calling out familiar examples, from offices stationing a “uniformed guard-for-hire” to check visitors’ ID cards to airports banning liquids and using full-body scanners to search for explosive material that, it turns out, they are not great at detecting anyway. So much magical thinking pervades airport security that Schneier has bluntly declared, “The two things that have made flying safer since 9/11 are reinforcing the cockpit doors and persuading passengers that they need to fight back. Everything beyond that isn’t worth it.”

Security theater is linked to the ideology of solutionism and bolstered by the common human tendency to want to show strength in the face of danger. An example in recent years is local school boards turning to facial recognition technology to protect students from gun violence. Boosters claim these systems can prevent the next Parkland…