This article was published at Inside Story on 23 April 2020, ahead of the launch of the Australian Government’s CovidSafe tracing app.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. While we wait for a vaccine, we need to track and trace exactly where the virus is moving. Only then can life return to some kind of normal.
But should this process — known as contact tracing — be automated? And if so, how?
The Australian government’s Covid-19 app highlights the complexities of rolling out digital contact-tracing technology in a democratic society. Dealing with a public health crisis is vital, but it mustn’t be an excuse to infringe personal privacy and extend government surveillance. Can the two goals — controlling the virus and protecting privacy — be achieved simultaneously?
Debate is raging globally about the design conventions needed to ensure contact-tracing apps do exactly that. International conventions and frameworks are being established collaboratively at breakneck speed.
The speed is important, not only because governments are looking to use these tools that are in many cases privately managed, if open-sourced, but also because the new data-tracking conventions are likely to stick around long after the vaccine arrives.
Fighting the coronavirus asks all of us to collaborate, constructively, in using digital technology to solve a public health crisis. Given we’re not coming off a strong base of cooperation, this is not going to be easy.
In Australia, the government faces a major personal-data trust deficit. The botched implementation of the NBN, robodebt and the digital census all bolster concerns about the government’s capacity to manage data and raise fears that it is unlikely to get it right this time.
Internationally, trust in the big digital platforms — in their capacity to govern the flow of information in ways that uphold the principles of a free and open internet — has been at an all-time low since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The incapacity or unwillingness of Facebook and other major platforms to stem the tide of misinformation has acted as a wrecking ball among the major global democracies.
China’s rapid pivot towards artificial intelligence, meanwhile, has amply demonstrated how vertically integrated digital infrastructure can be mobilised to limit the freedoms of citizens and quash dissent.
Not surprisingly, many technology critics have been quick to argue that technological tools alone are not the answer — that we need to look beyond the “solutionism” offered by tech companies seeking to bake public health systems into their own infrastructure.
But just as we shouldn’t accept the false trade-off between public health and digital privacy, as many rightly argue, should we also simply accept that public authorities are incapable of implementing technology systems effectively? Must we tolerate a trade-off between trust and innovation, reinforced by lack of confidence in how government uses personal data?
Read the full article here.