Abstract
Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of whom or what to trust have become paramount. This article examines the public debates surrounding the initial development of the German Corona-Warn-App in 2020 as a case study to analyse such questions at the intersection of trust and trustworthiness in technology development, design and oversight. Providing some insights into the nature and dynamics of trust and trustworthiness, we argue that (a) trust is only desirable and justified if placed well, that is, if directed at those being trustworthy; that (b) trust and trustworthiness come in degrees and have both epistemic and moral components; and that (c) such a normatively demanding understanding of trust excludes technologies as proper objects of trust and requires that trust is directed at socio-technical assemblages consisting of both humans and artefacts. We conclude with some lessons learned from our case study, highlighting the epistemic and moral demands for trustworthy technology development as well as for public debates about such technologies, which ultimately requires attributing epistemic and moral duties to all actors involved.
Highlights
Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of whom or what to trust have become paramount
Providing some insights into the nature and dynamics of trust and trustworthiness, we argue that (a) trust is only desirable and justified if placed well, that is, if directed at those being trustworthy; that (b) trust and trustworthiness come in degrees and have both epistemic and moral components; and that (c) such a normatively demanding understanding of trust excludes technologies as proper objects of trust and requires that trust is directed at socio-technical assemblages consisting of both humans and artefacts
In order to answer this question, we will draw upon the characteristics of trust and trustworthiness outlined above, namely that (a) trust is not valuable per se, but only insofar as it is targeted at agents and activities that are genuinely trustworthy; that (b) trust and trustworthiness come in degrees and have both a moral component and an epistemic component; and that (c) trust cannot be directed at technological artefacts as such, but only at the actor– network behind such technologies
Summary
Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions of whom or what to trust have become paramount. A few days later, on 24 April, a coalition of six influential German organizations – the Chaos Computer Club, the digital policy-focused associations D64 and LOAD, the Forum of Computer Scientists and ITProfessionals for Peace and Social Responsibility, the German Informatics Society and the Foundation for Data Protection – wrote an open letter to Minister Spahn in which they criticized the German government’s decision to support the PEPP-PT protocol They stressed that any tracing app should, if built at all, be based on a decentralized architecture as the insufficient privacy safeguards of the centralized approach would erode people’s trust in using such an app and undermine the acceptance of future digital solutions. The government, she emphasized, had opted for ‘full transparency’ with regard to the development of the Corona-Warn-App and was hoping that many people would decide to use it
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