While public health experts say contact tracing remains a vital part of controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, some advocates for privacy and immigration rights are raising concerns about what might happen to the data gathered on people’s movements and contacts.

State Senator Gustavo Rivera and state Assemblyman Richard Gottfried--who both chair their chambers' respective health committees--have introduced a bill to protect the data compiled by contact tracers from legal processes and made inadmissible in court proceedings. The bill would also prohibit law enforcement and immigration enforcement employees from serving as contact tracers.

“If you come to me and you say, ‘I need to know where you were for the last two weeks, who you interact with etc.,’ I am sharing a lot of personal information with you,” Rivera said in a phone interview Friday. “If I do not trust that that information is going to remain private, particularly if I am either an undocumented person myself, or I have family members who are undocumented or have had issues with immigration authorities, or just in this particular moment when there's...so much mistrust in law enforcement generally, do I trust that the information that I give you is going to be used strictly for medical and public health purposes? Currently, we don't have that guaranteed. So this still is necessary because we have to make sure that we ensure privacy protections.”

In a statement after the bill was first introduced in the Assembly in late May, Gottfried compared the proposed policies to legislation enacted to prevent the disclosure of HIV testing information.

“Contact tracing is not going to work unless people are confident the information they give to contact tracers is not going to be used against them, is not going to be given to the police, to immigration, or their employer,” Gottfried said.

Rivera hopes the bill will be considered when the state legislature returns to session on July 20th.

The city's "Test & Trace Corps" is overseen by NYC Health + Hospitals, which assures New Yorkers that information gathered by contact tracers "is confidential and protected under the New York City Health Code. The Test & Trace Corps will not ask about anyone’s immigration status. Any information the Test & Trace Corps obtains will be stored securely and used by authorized Test & Trace Corps staff for the limited purpose of protecting public health. The Test & Trace Corps database will not be linked to any law enforcement databases."

But privacy advocates worry that without new legislation, some of that confidential information could be subpoenaed by law enforcement. The New York Civil Liberties Union argues that a better guarantee of protected data would give people more confidence in contact tracing.

“Law enforcement and immigration authorities have, time and time again, given Black and brown communities – the very communities hardest hit by COVID-19 – reason for distrust,” said Allie Bohm, NYCLU Policy Counsel, in a statement. "One need only look at the brutal law enforcement reaction to the protests of white supremacy and police violence to understand why. The confidentiality of contact tracing information is not just a privacy and civil rights imperative; it is a public health imperative."

There’s a real fear that President Donald Trump’s administration, with its hardline immigration tactics, would use contact tracing data to deport immigrants, said Max Hadler, New York Immigration Coalition’s director of health policy.

"It's an unfortunate reflection on the state of US immigration authorities that a bill like this is necessary, but it's also an unambiguous truth that New York state must pass legislation to protect this data. We cannot risk the success of the contact tracing efforts by failing to seal off access by federal authorities that have stopped at nothing over years to terrorize immigrant communities,” Hadler said in a statement.

Rivera pointed to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement directive issued this past week that would withhold student visas from international students if their American schools switched completely to online learning as an example of the federal government’s “racist, xenophobic ways.”

“It is not a stretch to think that they would try to use information -- in this case, information which is necessary from a public health perspective to determine who has been potentially exposed -- to use it against people, particularly folks who are immigrants. I have no doubt that they would try to do that,” he said. “Therefore as a state, we need to make sure that we have an effective program and to do that we must ensure that there are privacy protections to the information that is shared.”