COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps: Ethical Challenges for a Social Experiment on a Global Scale
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps: Ethical Challenges for a Social Experiment on a Global Scale Federica Lucivero & Nina Hallowell & Stephanie Johnson & Barbara Prainsack & Gabrielle Samuel & Tamar Sharon
Received: 5 May 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of infection containment in post-lockdown societies around the globe. This paper discusses a number of questions that should be addressed when assessing the ethical challenges of mobile applications for digital contact-tracing of COVID-19: Which safeguards should be designed in the technology? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for “Big Tech” companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How should cultural and behavioural issues be accounted for in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? We demonstrate that responses to these questions are complex and contingent F. Lucivero (*) : N. Hallowell : S. Johnson Ethox and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Old Road Campus, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Prainsack Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria B. Prainsack : G. Samuel Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London, London, UK T. Sharon Department of Practical Philosophy & Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
and argue that if digital contract-tracing is used, then it should be clear that this is on a trial basis and its use should be subject to independent monitoring and evaluation. Keywords Contact tracing apps . COVID-19 . Transparency . Social experiment
Introduction The “Alipay Health Code” application (app) was developed by Ant Financial, a sister company of the technology company Alibaba and initially deployed in Hangzhou, China, during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Health Code algorithm matches actively collected data (self-reported symptoms, individual’s address, personal ID) and passively collected data such as GPS location, and assigns the individual a coloured code (Green, Amber, Red) which, when combined with scanned quick response (QR) codes, determines access to public areas, such as subways, malls, and markets (Mozur, Zhong, and Krolik 2020). A similar app, originally used during the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus epidemics, has been deployed in South Korea. Another one, “Trace Together,” has been launched by the Singapore government as a tool to support and supplement manual contact-tracing utilizing Bluetooth wireless technology. Several countries have shown interest in digital contact-tracing apps since mid-March 2020, and in Europe there has been widespread media coverage of
Bioethical Inquiry
academic and corporate developments and go
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