Brian Ray, IoT Collaborative Cybersecurity Liaison and Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University, was awarded two related grants from the Charles Koch Foundation and CSU’s COVID-19 faculty research fund. This funding supports research around privacy and civil liberties issues raised by the use of 
contact-tracing applications and related surveillance technologies in COVID-19 response efforts. In April, Ray led the drafting of a set of recommended principles to guide the State of Ohio’s use of these technologies by the CyberOhio Advisory Board, which was subsequently submitted to Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted for review.
The grants also will fund his work with a group of municipal and county data privacy leaders who are part of the Future of Privacy Forum’s Civic Data Privacy Leaders Network to develop privacy impact assessments and best practices for using these applications, as well as collaborations with several other groups developing privacy-protective applications. The Data Privacy Leaders group and Ray are coordinating their project with a group of MIT researchers who are developing a cross-cutting set of privacy principles for these applications. One result of this collaboration is an invitation by Kansas Senator Jerry Moran’s staff to provide input on the COVID-19 Consumer Data Privacy legislation that he is co-sponsoring.