Page - 267 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

267Privacy, Ethics, and Contact-Tracing Apps both their geographic location and their physical proximity to other devices. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that data about our move- ments and contacts collected by these devices are being enlisted to play a role in the battle against COVID-19. Governments around the world have shown interest in the potential for cellphone applications, or “apps,” to assist in contact tracing normally performed by public health officials and to better enable the gradual lifting of physical dis- tancing restrictions. Developers have produced these apps rapidly, with little time for user testing. Adopting them raises important privacy and ethical concerns.1 This chapter identifies and examines a number of these. We begin by tracing the history of contact tracing as a manual method and then detail the current digital contact-tracing efforts, which include different types of apps and data use approaches. The core of the paper draws from our complementary expertise in privacy law, ethics, and sociology to outline some potential limitations of these contact-tracing apps along these dimensions. We end with an argument that data pri- vacy, technology ethics, and social justice must guide the develop- ment and use of contact-tracing apps. Contact Tracing as a Public Health Measure Contact tracing is a well-established public health practice for slowing the spread of an infectious disease within a community.2 Typically, a person who tests positive for a given disease is questioned by public health officials to determine those with whom that person had contact during the period in which they would have been contagious. Officials then contact those at-risk individuals, at which point they may direct them to seek immediate medical treatment if they are symptomatic or instruct them to get tested. If the infected person travelled on a bus 1. Although privacy has an ethical dimension, we treat it separately because pri- vacy rights are legally protected under the Canadian  Charter  of  Rights  and  Freedoms and in provincial and federal privacy legislation. In our view it is important to distinguish between issues of legal compliance and broader questions about how to do the right thing in concert with the law and wider social values. See e.g. Emanuel Moss, “Too Big a Word, What Does it Mean to do ‘Ethics’ in the Technology Industry?” (29 April 2020), online: Points,  Data  &  Society <points. datasociety.net/too-big-a-word-13e66e62a5bf>. 2. “Contact Tracing: Part of a Multipronged Approach to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic” (29 April 2020), online: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention <www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/principles-contact-tracing.html>.