Abstract
Governments worldwide view contact tracing as a key tool to mitigate COVID-19 community transmission. Contact tracing investigations are time consuming and labour intensive. Mobile phone location tracking has been a new data-driven option to potentially obviate investigative inefficiencies. However, using mobile phone apps for contact tracing purposes gives rise to complex privacy issues. Governmental presentation and implementation of contact tracing apps, therefore, requires careful and sensitive delivery of a coherent policy position to establish citizen trust, which is an essential component of uptake and use. This article critically examines the Australian Government’s initial implementation of the COVIDSafe app. We outline a series of implementation misalignments that juxtapose an underpinning regulatory rationality predicated on the implementation of information privacy law protections with rhetorical campaigns to reinforce different justifications for the app’s use. We then examine these implementation misalignments from Mayer and colleagues’ lens of trustworthiness (1995) and its three core domains: ability, integrity and benevolence. The three domains are used to examine how the Australian Government’s implementation strategy provided a confused understanding of processes that enhance trustworthiness in the adoption of new technologies. In conclusion, we provide a better understanding about securing trustworthiness in new technologies through the establishment of a value consensus that requires alignment of regulatory rationales and rhetorical campaigning.
Highlights
The World Health Organization noted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that contact tracing was “the backbone” of successful governmental response.[1]
For the purposes of this article, we focus on the information privacy issues relevant to the implementation of the COVIDSafe app, given the importance attached to these types of protections by the Australian Government in its COVIDSafe implementation strategy
We contend that the fairness component is vital to consider regarding regulatory and rhetorical attempts to engender trust in the adoption of new governmental forms of data collection. It points to a complex area of information privacy law that is conceptually thin in Australia to the extent that it is almost absent in application,[84] but is resoundingly constructed as “proportionality” in other jurisdictions, in the European context.[85]
Summary
The World Health Organization noted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that contact tracing was “the backbone” of successful governmental response.[1]. The policy basis provides focus on how information privacy law protections and technical requirements are implemented through regulatory rationales and rhetorical campaigning.
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