Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID‑19: who is (not) free to go? Michael Klenk1 · Hein Duijf2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not solely to maximise the ratio of people freed from quarantine but to also ensure that the composition of the freed group is fair. We identify several factors that pose a risk for fair group composition along with an analysis of general lessons for a philosophy of technology. Policymakers, epidemiologists, and developers can use these risk factors to benchmark proposal technologies, curb the pandemic, and keep public trust. Keywords COVID-19 · Digital ethics · Fairness · Digital contact tracing · Active responsibility The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has forced almost a third of the world’s population into some form of quarantine (Kaplan et al. 2020), causing severe rights-restrictions, as well as drastic economic, social, and psychological harms. Societies are seeking ways to return to normality. Evaluating ‘when’ to get back to normal is hard, but the question of ‘how’ is no less daunting (Walensky and Del Rio 2020). A significant proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections (47%) occur before the onset of symptoms, which means that infected individuals will likely spread the virus unknowingly. These pre-symptomatic infections make traditional contact tracing approaches infeasible (Ferretti et al. 2020). Digital tracing technologies have been proposed as a solution to manage pre-symptomatic infections by alerting individuals and others they have come into contact with in realtime of high-risk exposures, imposing a quarantine on the full contact chain. Singapore released such a contact-tracing app on March 20th 2020, and similar developments are currently underway in many other countries (Azevedo Silva 2020). Digital tracing elicits an individual’s self-reported
* Michael Klenk [email protected] Hein Duijf [email protected] 1
Institute for Business Ethics, St Gallen, Switzerland & Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2
health status and identifies individual’s contacts through smartphone-based proximity capture. We argue in this article that, despite its intuitive appeal, digital tracing risks addressing the wrong problem, and in consequence, its employment raises pressing and hitherto unacknowledged concerns about fairness. There are significant risks that digital tracing apps will fail to sufficiently reduce the number of people in quarantine while introducing new psychological, social, economic, and political risks associated with such large-scale technological experiments. Our central claim is that digital tracing poses a fairness risk. In particular, because having a job that cannot be done from home is unequ
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