Introduction: Privacy and Pandemics

This set of articles in this special issue illustrate a number of ways that the realities of a global pandemic may challenge different perspectives on privacy protection and the appropriate relationship with other rights and responsibilities. They arose from a virtual roundtable, held on 15 June 2020 at Melbourne Law School, under the aegis of the Privacy and Pandemics Information Network. The network was formed as a rapid response to the overwhelming number of privacy issues being raised almost simultaneously by, or as a result of, the various government and private actor attempts to deal with COVID-19 in Australia and around the world.

Public–Private Collaboration Led by Private Organizations in Combating Crises: Evidence From China’s Fighting Against COVID-19

Public–private collaborations have the potential to effectively respond to extreme events. However, traditional public–private collaborations that are usually led by governmental actors often encounter significant difficulties in a crisis. Based on a case study of a public–private collaboration dealing with COVID-19 in China, we explore how a private actor emerges as a leader to initiate and manage a public–private collaboration in the crisis, and how stakeholders in this collaboration work together to effectively handle the crisis. The findings indicate critical characteristics and contingencies when a private actor leads the cross-sector collaboration to effectively cope with uncertainties and deliver public services in crisis time.

The Duties of Private Donors

This chapter focuses on the philanthropist as one kind of private actor. It argues that the philanthropist's duty to give should be understood neither as an imperfect duty of beneficence nor as a conclusive duty of justice, but rather as a transitional and provisional duty of reparative justice in contemporary societies. It also explains a duty that is “transitional,” as it should eventually be taken over by public institutions, or “provisional,” for in the absence of just institutions its fulfilment is simultaneously demanded by individual independence. The chapter explains why the duty is “reparative” as it is grounded on the wealthy's liability for wrongful harm to the poor. It discusses the funding of justice through private philanthropy and the provision of justice through private organizations.

“Verticalised” cases before the European Court of Human Rights unravelled: An analysis of their characteristics and the Court’s approach to them

Based on Article 34 European Convention on Human Rights, individual applications must be directed against one of the Convention States. Originally ‘horizontal’ cases therefore must be ‘verticalised’ in order to be admissible. This means that a private actor who had first brought a procedure against another private actor before the domestic courts, must complain about State (in)action in his application to the European Court of Human Rights. Recently, some scholars and judges have raised procedural issues that may arise in these cases, but generally, these ‘verticalised’ cases have remained underexplored. To unravel verticalised cases before the ECtHR and to better understand procedural issues that may arise from them, this article provides a deeper understanding of the origins of verticalised cases and the Court’s approach to them. It is explained that verticalised cases before the ECtHR can be very different in nature. These differences are rooted in the different types of horizontal conflicts that may arise on the domestic level, the different relations between private actors they may concern, and the different Convention rights that may be at stake. The wide variety of verticalized cases is also reflected in the Court’s approach to them, as is the second main topic that the present article explores.

Differentially Private Actor and Its Eligibility Trace

We present a differentially private actor and its eligibility trace in an actor-critic approach, wherein an actor takes actions directly interacting with an environment; however, the critic estimates only the state values that are obtained through bootstrapping. In other words, the actor reflects the more detailed information about the sequence of taken actions on its parameter than the critic. Moreover, their corresponding eligibility traces have the same properties. Therefore, it is necessary to preserve the privacy of an actor and its eligibility trace while training on private or sensitive data. In this paper, we confirm the applicability of differential privacy methods to the actors updated using the policy gradient algorithm and discuss the advantages of such an approach with regard to differentially private critic learning. In addition, we measured the cosine similarity between the differentially private applied eligibility trace and the non-differentially private eligibility trace to analyze whether their anonymity is appropriately protected in the differentially private actor or the critic. We conducted the experiments considering two synthetic examples imitating real-world problems in medical and autonomous navigation domains, and the results confirmed the feasibility of the proposed method.

Modeling Financial System with Interbank Flows, Borrowing, and Investing

In our model, private actors with interbank cash flows similar to, but more general than that by Carmona et al. (2013) borrow from the non-banking financial sector at a certain interest rate, controlled by the central bank, and invest in risky assets. Each private actor aims to maximize its expected terminal logarithmic wealth. The central bank, in turn, aims to control the overall economy by means of an exponential utility function. We solve all stochastic optimal control problems explicitly. We are able to recreate occasions such as liquidity trap. We study distribution of the number of defaults (net worth of a private actor going below a certain threshold).

When the State Hates

This chapter considers the liberal state not as an opponent, but as a perpetrator, of hate. It explores the possibility that the liberal state might express or enact, through policies or institutional action or design, something we would recognize as hate if it were perpetrated by a private actor or a repressive regime. The chapter takes as a case study the regime of “enforcement by attrition” deployed against undocumented immigrants by American states such as Arizona, analyzing both the features and the distinctive disavowals that characterize liberal state hate. It then argues that the liberal, democratic character of the state supplies more than a subterfuge for state hate: it can provide a resource that enables targeted groups and their allies to resist state hate.