Towards a seamful ethics of Covid-19 contact tracing apps?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Towards a seamful ethics of Covid‑19 contact tracing apps? Andrew S. Hoffman1,2 · Bart Jacobs1,3 · Bernard van Gastel1,4 · Hanna Schraffenberger1 · Tamar Sharon1,2 · Berber Pas1,5
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the early months of 2020, the deadly Covid-19 disease spread rapidly around the world. In response, national and regional governments implemented a range of emergency lockdown measures, curtailing citizens’ movements and greatly limiting economic activity. More recently, as restrictions begin to be loosened or lifted entirely, the use of so-called contact tracing apps has figured prominently in many jurisdictions’ plans to reopen society. Critics have questioned the utility of such technologies on a number of fronts, both practical and ethical. However, little has been said about the ways in which the normative design choices of app developers, and the products that result therefrom, might contribute to ethical reflection and wider political debate. Drawing from scholarship in critical design and human–computer interaction, this paper examines the development of a QR code-based tracking app called Zwaai (‘Wave’ in Dutch), where its designers explicitly positioned the app as an alternative to the predominant Bluetooth and GPS-based approaches. Through analyzing these designers’ choices, this paper argues that QR code infrastructures can work to surface a set of ethical–political seams, two of which are discussed here—responsibilization and networked (im)permanence—that more ‘seamless’ protocols like Bluetooth actively aim to bypass, and which may go otherwise unnoticed by existing ethical frameworks. Keywords Digital ethics · Seamful infrastructure · Critical design · Contact tracing · Covid-19
Introduction In the early months of 2020, the deadly Covid-19 disease spread rapidly around the world. In response, national and regional governments implemented a range of emergency lockdown measures, curtailing citizens’ movements and greatly limiting economic activity. More recently, as jurisdictions across five continents have begun lifting these restrictions, the use of so-called contact tracing apps has * Andrew S. Hoffman [email protected] 1
Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance (iHub), Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
2
Department of Practical Philosophy, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
3
Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
4
Open University, Heerlen, the Netherlands
5
Institute for Management Research, School of Management, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
figured prominently in plans to reopen society, alongside the more basic prerequisite of having capacity to conduct population-based testing for the disease at scale (WHO 2020). The World Health Organization defines contact tracing as ‘the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission’ and deems it ‘an essen
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