The proliferation of surveillance technology during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a myriad of responses from the public. We posit that public trust and confidence in state control policies employing these technologies is tenuous at best, and the trust-deficit has had a significant impact on the efficacy of the control measures. Without genuinely engaging and including citizens into the conceptualisation, development, implementation and decommissioning of policies and tech, data subjects are relegated to data objects. In this presentation, we argue that principled design and citizen inclusion at crucial stages of pandemic control responses can preserve the rights and integrity of all individuals during the crisis (and beyond) without jeopardising efficacy. We reject the position that there must be a trade-off between personal data protection and health security. In our work, digital self-determination has the potential to make surveillance technologies (including the data it produces and shares) more legitimate from the data subject’s perspective, thereby aiding in more robust control policies.