Governments and private companies can use location data to track the success of lockdown measures, monitor bluetooth signals to help contact tracing efforts, or keep an eye on search queries to help identify new clusters of infection or previously unknown symptoms.
Privacy activists have warned, however, that such extensions of surveillance could be a dangerous precedent that would be hard to roll back once the crisis is over.
The TBI argues in the report published on Friday that those fears are valid, but understate the degree of trade-off that many countries face.
"Carefully applied, technology gives policymakers a possible way through the crisis that reduces otherwise very high costs in terms of lives lost and livelihoods destroyed," said Chris Yiu, the institute's executive director of technology and public policy. "But this escape route comes with a price: dramatically increased technological surveillance. Under the right conditions, this is a price worth paying.
"In normal times the degree of monitoring and state intervention we are talking about here would be out of the question in liberal democracies," Yiu continued. "But these are not normal times, and the alternatives are even more unpalatable. This is quite different from the traditional debate about whether confronting security threats to our way of life merits sacrificing the values of freedom and privacy that define us.
"Covid-19 is not an ideology, and rebalancing the contract between citizens and the state to take advantage of the capabilities of new technologies is not capitulation."
As a result, governments should consider a number of interventions that might normally cross the line, Yiu said. For instance, states could require technology platforms to share, in aggregate form, search and social media trends, and telemetry from wearables and other connected devices, to help them respond to the crisis. And they could share patient data internationally, to accelerate the search for treatments and vaccines, rather than putting up walls around national health services as they would in normal times.
But the brakes should not be removed entirely. The TBI argues strongly against "coercive" linking of apps and services: for instance, requiring people to use a contact tracing programme in order to receive digital credentials proving they are key workers. "If it is necessary to deem participation in a scheme mandatory," the report argues, "this should be legislated for."
Others disagree, however. A joint letter from almost 300 academics working in computer science and privacy rejected the dichotomy the TBI proposed, arguing that technological surveillance would hamper, not help, efforts to fight the coronavirus by wrecking the public trust that is needed for uptake.
The academics wrote: "It is crucial that citizens trust the applications in order to produce sufficient uptake to make a difference in tackling the crisis. It is vital that, in coming out of the current crisis, we do not create a tool that enables large-scale data collection on the population, either now or at a later time. Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion. Such information can include the 'social graph' of who someone has physically met over a period of time."
The TBI's intervention comes amid an uneasy alliance of technology companies and nation states. To aid digital contact tracing, for example, Apple and Google announced a plan to build privacy-protecting technologies into the base layer of their Android and iOS operating systems. But some countries, including France, have argued the privacy protections that the tech companies have mandated are preventing them from carrying out important work, like telling individual users specific details of their contact with an infected person.
"We're asking Apple to lift the technical hurdle to allow us to develop a sovereign European health solution that will be tied our health system," France's digital minister, Cédric O, said on Monday.
Comment: You can't get much more blatantly transparent than this. This manufactured crisis is here to institute levels of surveillance that would never be accepted by the citizenry had they not been scared into accepting it. The lockdown is a hysterical overreaction to an over-hyped virus, but the surveillance state that results will be the gift that keeps on giving.
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