The Smartphone Pandemic: How Big Tech and public health authorities partner in the digital response to Covid-19

Storeng, Katerini Tagmatarchi; Puyvallée, Antoine de Bengy

doi:10.1080/17441692.2021.1882530

Cited by 54 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Proportionality, that is, ensuring the intervention is a proportionate response to the public health threat, defines the ethical limits of other aspects of the IDCTA, such as its clinical and societal use and its interference with privacy and data protection rights [ 14 , 58 , 59 , 176 ]. There is no doubt that COVID-19 is a significant threat to public health, as evident even from early reports [ 177 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are also ongoing concerns regarding Google’s lawful and transparent use of location data [ 189 ]. The entry of private corporations into pandemic response may create a dependency on them to deliver public health necessities, global health policies, and result in an accumulation of decision-making powers across multiple aspects of society and subversion of democratically elected governments [ 59 , 176 ]. Despite concerns surrounding the role of private corporations in digital contact tracing, the number of app downloads was high [ 37 , 190 ].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is considerable agreement between the frameworks and among early guidance from the European Commission [57] and digital technology expert groups [14,58] about the considerations necessary to design and deploy DCTAs ethically, which broadly can be described as proportionality, voluntariness, transparency and trustworthiness, and equity. Proportionality, that is, ensuring the intervention is a proportionate response to the public health threat, defines the ethical limits of other aspects of the IDCTA, such as its clinical and societal use and its interference with privacy and data protection rights [14, 58,59,176]. There is no doubt that COVID-19 is a significant threat to public health, as evident even from early reports [177].…”

Section: Ethical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

O’Connell

Abbas

Beecham

et al. 2021

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth

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Background Digital contact tracing apps have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt COVID-19 transmission by rapidly identifying secondary cases prior to the onset of infectiousness and linking them into a system of quarantine, testing, and health care worker case management. The international experience of digital contact tracing apps during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how challenging their design and deployment are. Objective This study aims to derive and summarize best practice guidance for the design of the ideal digital contact tracing app. Methods A collaborative cross-disciplinary approach was used to derive best practice guidance for designing the ideal digital contact tracing app. A search of the indexed and gray literature was conducted to identify articles describing or evaluating digital contact tracing apps. MEDLINE was searched using a combination of free-text terms and Medical Subject Headings search terms. Gray literature sources searched were the World Health Organization Institutional Repository for Information Sharing, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control publications library, and Google, including the websites of many health protection authorities. Articles that were acceptable for inclusion in this evidence synthesis were peer-reviewed publications, cohort studies, randomized trials, modeling studies, technical reports, white papers, and media reports related to digital contact tracing. Results Ethical, user experience, privacy and data protection, technical, clinical and societal, and evaluation considerations were identified from the literature. The ideal digital contact tracing app should be voluntary and should be equitably available and accessible. User engagement could be enhanced by small financial incentives, enabling users to tailor aspects of the app to their particular needs and integrating digital contact tracing apps into the wider public health information campaign. Adherence to the principles of good data protection and privacy by design is important to convince target populations to download and use digital contact tracing apps. Bluetooth Low Energy is recommended for a digital contact tracing app's contact event detection, but combining it with ultrasound technology may improve a digital contact tracing app's accuracy. A decentralized privacy-preserving protocol should be followed to enable digital contact tracing app users to exchange and record temporary contact numbers during contact events. The ideal digital contact tracing app should define and risk-stratify contact events according to proximity, duration of contact, and the infectiousness of the case at the time of contact. Evaluating digital contact tracing apps requires data to quantify app downloads, use among COVID-19 cases, successful contact alert generation, contact alert receivers, contact alert receivers that adhere to quarantine and testing recommendations, and the number of contact alert receivers who subsequently are tested positive for COVID-19. The outcomes of digital contact tracing apps' evaluations should be openly reported to allow for the wider public to review the evaluation of the app. Conclusions In conclusion, key considerations and best practice guidance for the design of the ideal digital contact tracing app were derived from the literature.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ethical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

O’Connell

Abbas

Beecham

et al. 2021

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An important concern is that contact tracing apps based on Apple and Google’s exposure notification system cannot be integrated with manual contact tracing, and partly hands control of a core public health intervention and its associated data away from public authorities, and over to multinational corporations. It also shifts more responsibility for infection control onto individual smartphone users, who must decide not only to download the app, but also to seek out and enter a notification code into the app when they receive a positive test result and take the initiative to get tested or respect a quarantine when notified of a possible exposure (Storeng and de Bengy Puyvallée, 2021).…”

Section: ‘Manual’ Vs Automated Contact Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 1 This policy insight draws partly from a research article published in Global Public Health (Storeng & de Bengy Puyvallée 2021) and an op‐ed published in the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet , available at: https://morgenbladet.no/ideer/2020/12/det-store-smittestopp-eksperimentet …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Big Digital Contact Tracing Experiment¹

Puyvallée

Storeng

2021

Global Policy

Self Cite

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Over a third of the world’s countries have launched contact‐tracing apps in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, generating much hype about the prospect of automating contact‐tracing to manage outbreaks and to alleviate costly and labour‐intensive ‘manual’ contact tracing. Despite the stringent scientific criteria applied to the development of vaccines and other ‘biomedical countermeasures’ in responding to the pandemic, digital contact tracing has been widely recommended despite being an unproven public health intervention. Evidence for its effectiveness is thin, based on theoretical mathematical modelling and unsystematic observations across diverse country contexts. Establishing evidence of effectiveness is complicated by the fact that two private corporations, Apple and Google, own the technology upon which most government contact‐tracing apps are based and which, by design, restricts access to needed data on privacy grounds. In this policy insight, we make the case for why public health authorities urgently need to establish the effectiveness and societal implications of this big digital contact‐tracing experiment.

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Governing digital crisis responses: platform standards and the dilemma of COVID-19 contact tracing

2022

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In response to the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, various developers turned to smartphone-based contact tracing to address the challenges of manual tracing. Due to the presence of network effects, i.e., the effectiveness of contact tracing applications increases with the number of users, information technology standards were critical to the technology’s success. The standardization efforts in Europe led to a variety of trade-offs concerning the choice of an appropriate technological architecture due to the contradictory tensions resulting from the dualism between the need for contact tracing data to contain the pandemic and the need for data minimization to preserve user privacy. Drawing predominantly on the software platform and standards literature, we conduct an interpretive case study to examine the emergence and consequences of this multi-layered decision situation. Our findings reveal how Google and Apple were able to limit the individual leeway of external developers, thereby effectively resolving the European standards war. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the various short-term and long-term trade-offs associated with the standardization of contact tracing applications and translate our findings into recommendations for policy makers with respect to future crisis situations. Specifically, we propose a strategy grounded in our data that enables responsible actors to make goal-oriented and rapid decisions under time constraints.

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The Smartphone Pandemic: How Big Tech and public health authorities partner in the digital response to Covid-19

Cited by 54 publications

References 36 publications

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

The Big Digital Contact Tracing Experiment¹

Governing digital crisis responses: platform standards and the dilemma of COVID-19 contact tracing

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The Smartphone Pandemic: How Big Tech and public health authorities partner in the digital response to Covid-19

Cited by 54 publications

References 36 publications

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

Best Practice Guidance for Digital Contact Tracing Apps: A Cross-disciplinary Review of the Literature

The Big Digital Contact Tracing Experiment1

Governing digital crisis responses: platform standards and the dilemma of COVID-19 contact tracing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

The Big Digital Contact Tracing Experiment¹