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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>.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Titel
- VULNERABLE
- Untertitel
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Autoren
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Verlag
- Ottawa Press
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Abmessungen
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Seiten
- 648
- Kategorien
- Coronavirus
- International