Abstract
ABSTRACT Mobile applications for digital contact tracing have been developed and introduced around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed as a tool to support ‘traditional’ forms of contact-tracing carried out to monitor contagion, these apps have triggered an intense debate with respect to their legal and ethical permissibility, social desirability and general feasibility. Based on a large-scale study including qualitative data from 349 interviews conducted in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland, the United Kingdom), this paper shows that the binary framing often found in surveys and polls, which contrasts privacy concerns with the usefulness of these interventions for public health, does not capture the depth, breadth, and nuances of people’s positions towards COVID-19 contact-tracing apps. The paper provides a detailed account of how people arrive at certain normative positions by analysing the argumentative patterns, tropes and (moral) repertoires underpinning people’s perspectives on digital contact-tracing. Specifically, we identified a spectrum comprising five normative positions towards the use of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: opposition, scepticism of feasibility, pondered deliberation, resignation, and support. We describe these stances and analyse the diversity of assumptions and values that underlie the normative orientations of our interviewees. We conclude by arguing that policy attempts to develop and implement these and other digital responses to the pandemic should move beyond the reiteration of binary framings, and instead cater to the variety of values, concerns and expectations that citizens voice in discussions about these types of public health interventions.
Highlights
In March 2020,1 while many countries in Europe were experiencing lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, technology developers and policy makers started exploring the possibility of deploying digital tools to contain the pandemic (Budd et al, 2020)
In China and South Korea, digital tools based on collecting geolocation data were already being used to track people’s whereabouts, identify potential contagions due to proximity to subjects who had resulted positive to COVID-19 testing, and request those who were at risk of having contracted the disease to self-isolate
We identified a spectrum of five different normative positions towards the use of COVID-19 apps (Figure 1)
Summary
In March 2020,1 while many countries in Europe were experiencing lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, technology developers and policy makers started exploring the possibility of deploying digital tools to contain the pandemic (Budd et al, 2020). European countries developed and initiated mobile applications to support contact tracing, resort ing to Bluetooth technology to identify proximity between devices, register symptomatic cases and send notification of exposure. There has been a strong cross-fertilisation between public and policy debates around these apps, both at the national and European level, revolving around their legal and ethical permissibility, social desirability as well as feasibility and efficacy. Abeler et al, 2020; Schneble et al, 2020); and issues of voluntary as opposed to mandatory use of contact tracing apps, in the absence of explicit or implicit legal or social pressure At the centre of such debates have been issues of privacy and data protection, such as anonymity and data storage, the use of Bluetooth versus GPS technology, decentralized versus centralized data gathering (e.g. Abeler et al, 2020; Schneble et al, 2020); and issues of voluntary as opposed to mandatory use of contact tracing apps, in the absence of explicit or implicit legal or social pressure (e.g. Gasser et al, 2020; Parker et al, 2020), public-private partnerships in app-development, and open-source app design
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