The COVID-19 Contact Tracing App in the UK: Co-production in the Public Sector Which Went Wrong

Abstract

This study explores how accountability and trust in relationships between governments and citizens impact the outcomes of co-production of digital technologies implemented in emergency situations. The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic brought governments into the situations of having to make radical decisions and to act under tight time pressures. The paper focuses on the public discourse around contact tracing apps (CTAs), using the case of the United Kingdom as empirical setting. A framework to study accountability and trust in co-production of public services is developed. The study draws on a netnography method to analyze the reactions of the civil society expressed in social media to the introduction of the CTA, together with the consequences. Our findings carve out two pillars related to the discourse around the CTA, one related to technical and one related to social aspects. The analysis identifies specific concerns of citizens belonging to each pillar, highlighting polarization between government rhetoric attempts to justify the CTA’s possibilities of surveillance and direct interventions by mobilizing the arguments for physical safety, and the escalated public anxiety around the ambiguity of the broad range of CTA’s implications. The study also reveals that the main challenges of the CTA’s implementation were a high level of public skepticism and distrust of the UK government and its actions, as well as concerns related to the potential violation of democratic freedoms and the abuse of CTA and data the app was designed to collect.