Pandemic Tech Utopias and Capitalist Surveillance Cultures: The Case of Privacy-Preserving Contact-Tracing Apps

Abstract

In this article, we examine COVID-19 contact-tracing apps as a form of technological solutionism—a techno-social fix deployed at national scale in response to an urgent, supranational problem. A dystopian view sees contact-tracing apps as a vanguard technology for surveillance (French and Monahan, 2020), and threatens to transform a state of emergency into a state of exception, under which accepted or constitutional laws and norms might be suspended. However, our critique goes further. We argue the growing intervention of global technology corporations in digital governance and affairs of national sovereignty risks a new frontier of state–industrial surveillance that exploits people’s pre-investment in and dependence on technology corporations. We exemplify this with the “technofix” of the Google-Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) framework and critically examine the notion of a decentralised and privacy-preserving Bluetooth-based contact-tracing framework proposed by technology market leaders that threatens state sovereignty in determining public health responses.