As U.S. officials begin to think about getting people back to work and school in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, most agree that many tools will be necessary to rein it in before life can get back to normal. One method is contact tracing, and it's been used for decades to track the spread of disease. However, traditionally it has been labor-intensive, and one recent report from Johns Hopkins University says that to do it right, the nation needs an army of 100,000 contact tracers and $3.6 billion dollars.

Enter the tech sector. Many Silicon Valley giants are offering their support in the coronavirus crisis, from Facebook collaborating with Carnegie Mellon to map people self-reporting symptoms to Google and Apple developing a shared infrastructure for contact tracing apps. But many of these companies have spotty records when it comes to privacy, and some skeptics have raised concerns that these projects could lead to increased government surveillance.

One thing that Jennifer Daskal, law professor and faculty director of the of the Tech, Law, Security Program at American University Washington College of Law, believes is a big difference between the COVID-19 pandemic and past crises like the September 11, 2001 attacks, is that public health emergencies require the participation of everyday people to be effective. As she told WNYC's Jami Floyd, without the public's trust that their data and privacy will be protected, big tech's efforts could just fall flat.

"The whole point is to inform people, to be public and transparent and clear about who in fact has been exposed, potentially, to the disease," said Daskal. "So the starting point is very different, and as a result I think there's room for some optimism."

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