Legislative Memo: Expanded Contact Tracing Confidentiality

During the last legislative session, New York enacted critical legislation protecting the confidentiality of COVID-19-related contact tracing information. The law ensures that contact tracing achieves its public health goals and is not weaponized against communities of color. There is no principled reason why these sensible protections should apply only to COVID-19 contact tracing and not to contact tracing for all communicable diseases. A.7241/S.6491 would fix this disparity in the law and apply the protections in last year’s COVID-19 contact tracing confidentiality law to contact tracing for all communicable diseases, obviating the need to legislate new protections each time there is a new public health crisis.