Contact tracing apps and values dilemmas: A privacy paradox in a neo-liberal world

Contact-tracing apps and alienation in the age of COVID-19

“…In France, e-government initiatives launched during the COVID crisis, focused on online communication, an online form for administrative control during the lockdown, and the Stop-COVID contact-tracing app. While the European Data Protection Board pleaded in favour of developing a pan-European coordinated action plan for contacttracing apps, European countries adopted various stances, with some governments in favour of a decentralised, distributed, and privacy-preserving approach and others such as the French government, favouring a partially centralised approach (Rowe, 2020a).…”

“…During the vote at Parliament, Deputy Philippe Gosselin called for caution about "solutionism, this too high trust in technology" (May 27). He argued that the two files "SI-DEP" and "Contact Covid" related to the traditional method of contact tracing already available (see Rowe, 2020a) were sufficient. Deputy Patrick Hetzel (May 29) stated: "the app was approved but there are still numerous legal, ethical and societal questions to be answered, in addition to usefulness and efficiency issues.…”

“…Conversely, if use of the app is voluntary and every step in the tracing process requires explicit consent, it is highly unlikely that the critical threshold of use will be achieved to ensure effectiveness in contact tracing. If use is voluntary, as in Western countries, and if, from a utilitarian (consequentialist) viewpoint, we could argue that it is beneficial if it saves only one life, ethical and political concerns related to privacy and health still remain (Rowe, 2020a). Shifting government responsibility for negotiating the value dilemmas of privacy, freedom of movement and health, onto citizens and representatives in order to lift the lockdown is a mark of neo-liberal regimes (ibid).…”

“…• The unfortunate outcome (ineffective design), misunderstandings of the transmission paths and pan-European interoperability issues of apps can be partly explained by the government's use of coercive tactics in their urgency to act and demonstrate action and by the choice of a sovereign solution, all of which reinforce alienation. • Such alienation will prevail in: a) a digital age where "digital comes first" (Baskerville et al, 2020), i.e., when digital artefacts are created to represent reality before reality is known b) the control age (Beniger, 1986) where abusive location tracking and data collection (Rowe, 2020a) can lead to classification and detection frenzy, and c) the anthropocene age when reality seems too complex to search for causal explanations and where public action focuses on managing effects (Chandler 2019).…”

Developing infectious disease surveillance systems

“…This calls for a much more technologically advanced data collection system and a more pervasive one. Of course, this raises the question of how we can preserve personal freedom values in our societies and this has been an intense topic for debate, for instance, for the deployment of digital contact tracing apps 6,7 , which the decentralized framework 8 has not extinguished entirely 9 . This is a key issue that is addressed in a commissioned Perspective 10 that elaborates on possible frameworks to use digitally collected data (i.e.…”