Wastewater Monitoring Raises Privacy and Ethical Considerations

Analysis of municipal wastewater, or sewage for public health applications is a rapidly expanding field aimed at understanding emerging epidemiological trends, including human and disease migration. The newly gained ability to extract and analyze genetic material from wastewater poses important societal and ethical questions, including: How to safeguard data? Who owns genetic data recovered from wastewater? and What are the ethical and legal issues surrounding its use? In the U.S., both corporate and legal policies regarding privacy have been historically reactive instead of proactive. In wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), the pace of innovation has outpaced the ability of social and legal mechanisms to keep up. To address this discrepancy, early and robust discussions of the research, policies, and ethics surrounding WBE analysis and genetics are needed. This article contributes to this discussion by examining ownership issues for human genetic data recovered from wastewater and the uses to which it may be put. We focus particularly on the risks associated with personally identifiable data, highlighting potential risks, relevant privacy-enhancing technologies, and appropriate ethics. This article proposes an approach for people conducting WBE studies to help them systematically consider the ethical and privacy implications of their work.

I. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 reminds us that public health is an international issue, affected by globalization, urbanization, and population increase. Since the 1950s, urban living grew from 30% of the world’s population to over 50% now and is projected to reach 80% by 2050 [1], [2]. The increasing concentration of people in cities, together with recent technology advances, has stimulated work in wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), which can potentially provide valuable data to policymakers, researchers, and healthcare professionals, economically and quickly.