Framing ethical issues associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app: exceptionalising and narrowing the public ethics debate

G Samuel,F Lucivero

doi:10.1007/s10676-022-09628-z

Abstract

This paper explores ethical debates associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app that occurred in the public news media and broader public policy, and in doing so, takes ethics debate as an object for sociological study. The research question was: how did UK national newspaper news articles and grey literature frame the ethical issues about the app, and how did stakeholders associated with the development and/or governance of the app reflect on this? We examined the predominance of different ethical issues in news articles and grey literature, and triangulated this using stakeholder interview data. Findings illustrate how news articles exceptionalised ethical debate around the app compared to the way they portrayed ethical issues relating to ‘manual’ contact tracing. They also narrowed the debate around specific privacy concerns. This was reflected in the grey literature, and interviewees perceived this to have emerged from a ‘privacy lobby’. We discuss the findings, and argue that this limited public ethics narrative masked broader ethical issues.

Highlights

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 policymakers across the world announced that they would be developing contact tracing applications to assist with traditional (‘manual’) modes of tracing individuals who may have been exposed to the virus, by automating the process of both exposure measurement and contact notification
This article’s research question was, how did UK national newspaper news articles and UK grey literature frame the ethical issues associated with the UK COVID-19 app between its inception until June 2020, and how did stakeholders associated with the development and/or governance of the app reflect on this? We examined the predominance of how different ethical issues were discussed in news articles and grey literature, and triangulated this using our interview data
These included the prominence of reporting of ethical issues associated with the contact tracing app; the prominence of debate revolving around the ethical distinctions between the centralised versus decentralised app data collection approaches as they pertained to privacy issues associated with the data collection, storage and use; and the lesser extent to which other ethical concerns related to the app technology were reported and discussed, around those associated with the technology’s use

Summary

Introduction

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 policymakers across the world announced that they would be developing contact tracing applications (apps) to assist with traditional (‘manual’) modes of tracing individuals who may have been exposed to the virus, by automating the process of both exposure measurement and contact notification This automation was perceived to speed up the process, especially given the virus was infectious during the period leading up to and immediately after the start of symptoms. This would alleviate the time-consuming nature of contact tracing, allowing an interruption in the chain of transmission for both symptomatic and asymptomatic contacts of an index case, by instructing them to self-isolate even though they may not have symptoms In some countries, such as China, Taiwan and South Korea, apps were designed to use GPS to track the location and other metadata, such as credit card transactions from their citizens, to trace movements and potential exposures to the virus (Huang et al, 2020; Steinbrook, 2020). When a positive case is registered on a device’s app, all devices which have recently shared a code will receive an alert to self-isolate

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