In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strongly promoted a human-centric and trustworthy approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The 2021 proposal for a Regulation on AI that the EU seeks to establish as a global standard is the latest step in the matter. However, little attention has been paid to the EU’s use of AI to pursue its own purposes, despite its wide use of digital technologies, notably in the field of border management. Yet, such attention allows us to confront the highly moral discourse that characterises EU institutions’ communications and legislative acts with a concrete example of how the promoted values are realised “on the ground”. From this perspective, this paper takes the case study of the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS), an EU information technology system (planned to become operational in May 2023) that will provide travel authorisation to visa-exempt third-country nationals using a profiling algorithm. The paper shows, on the one hand, that ETIAS constitutes another piece in the massive infrastructure of digital surveillance of third-country nationals that the EU has been building for years. On the other hand, ETIAS’s algorithmic process is shown to be an instrument of differential exclusion that could well have an adverse impact on certain groups of foreign travellers. Ultimately, this paper argues that far from falling outside the scope of the trustworthy approach to AI championed by the EU, ETIAS – and more broadly the systematic risk evaluation predominant in the EU’s use of AI – is a constitutive part of it.

Indicators play a key role in the COVID-19 crisis. Infection and casualty rates are used as proxies for the spread and effect of the virus. There are also indicators about health care capacities, government responses, as well as combined rankings. The six contributions of this working paper explore the social role of these indicators in the COVID-19 crisis from various perspectives. We asked the contributors to reflect on one or more of the following questions: how can these and other COVID-19-related indicators be classified (descriptive, explanatory, normative etc.)? What can the prior debates about the strengths and weaknesses of indicators add to the discussion and uses of indicators in the current pandemic? Conversely, what can the way these indicators were made and used add to the academic discussion on indicators? How far do these indicators compare things that are comparable, in particular in a crosscountry context? What are the advantages and disadvantages (or uses and abuses) of these indicators? How far do (and should) these indicators guide social interventions and change behaviour? What is the role of law in terms of allowing, restricting or incorporating such indicators? What is the role of technology in this field? What are the relevant ethical considerations?

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to the massive development and use of health indicators. Drawing on the history of international public health and of the management of infectious disease, this paper attempts to show that the normative power acquired by metrics during the pandemic can be understood in light of two rationales: epidemiological surveillance and performance assessment. On the one hand, indicators are established to evaluate and rank countries’ responses to the outbreak; on the other, the evolution of indicators has a direct influence on the content of public health policies. Although quantitative data are an absolute necessity for coping with such disasters, it is critical to bear in mind the inherent partiality and precarity of the information provided by health indicators. Given the growing importance of normative quantitative devices during the pandemic, and assuming that their influence is unlikely to decrease in the future, they call for close scrutiny.