Public Goods From Private Data -- An Efficacy and Justification Paradox for Digital Contact Tracing

TL;DR

This paper discusses the ethical and practical challenges of digital contact tracing for COVID-19, arguing that privacy-focused approaches hinder public health benefits and proposing a shift towards viewing data as a public resource.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of treating aggregate data as a public resource to better balance privacy concerns with public health needs in digital contact tracing.

Findings

Privacy-centric analysis constrains DCT deployment.

Current models reinforce adversarial data relationships.

A public resource approach can improve ethical and effective DCT.

Abstract

Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy (Sharma & Bashir 2020, Tang 2020). This emphasis reveals significant challenges to ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis (Floridi & Strait 2020), preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology. Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the relationship between individuals and governments as adversarial, entrenches technology platforms as gatekeepers, and supports a conception of emergency public health authority as limited by individual consent and considerable corporate influence that is in some tension with the more communitarian values that typically inform public health ethics. To overcome the barriers to ethical and effective DCT, and develop infrastructure and policy that supports the realization of potential public benefits of digital technology, a public resource conception of aggregate data should be developed.