Mapping the Territories of Digital Contact Tracing

Abstracts

The throes of measuring the effectiveness of a public policy digital solution? Looking for users of contact tracing apps in COVID-19 time

Celine Cholez, Grenoble-Alpes University; with Vincent Roca

Convinced that human tracing would be overwhelmed by the nature of the COVID-19 contagion, epidemiologists, health experts, and computer scientists quickly saw the digitalization of contact tracing as a powerful complement to the traditional method. The efficiency of the solution also promptly became central to academic and institutional concerns: first because, based on an anonymous but massive detection process, the solution could only be efficient if significantly used, and second because in a virtuous circle, the more citizens would use it, the more it would be legitimate. Nevertheless, in their report on 27 contact tracing applications developed in the EU (Prodan & al, 2022), it was observed that the apps' monitoring remained incomplete and evaluation insufficient to the point where there was no accurate data to conclude.

Using an STS approach analyzing both the design process and the citizen experience of the French and the Japanese solutions, we explore the reasons for an announced efficiency assessment failure. We first dwell on the technological and privacy challenges that led many authorities to blindness as to the uses of the application. This investigation highlights the GAFA platform's power and the digital sovereignty issues, all questioning the States' platformization ambitions. Second, we focus on what these solutions miss in usage analysis terms. We see how defining usage and "adopter" remained unfinished, probably as it was tough to integrate everyday life, risk perception, and exposure in the algorithms. This paper contributes to an STS approach to measurement in an algorithmic world.

Infrastructuring Pandemic Citizenship: The German Contact Tracing App and the Fabrication of Liberal Conduct

Kevin Hall, NTNU Trondheim, Norway; with Sven Opitz and Klaus Scheuermann

This paper analyses the German contact tracing app (CWA) as a technopolitical device for the enactment of pandemic citizenship. Drawing on fieldwork with app developers, public health offices, and app users, it employs Madeleine Akrich’s approach of de-scription to unpack the assumptions about the proper use of the CWA and its ecology. The paper argues that the CWA was designed as a means whereby autonomous citizens were expected to modulate their everyday conduct in the pandemic in relation to an imagined community of vulnerable others. However, the de-scriptive reading of the app’s ecological relations to legal regulations, political and corporate stakeholders, administrative procedures, and organizational requirements detects the lack of a sociotechnical network of support for the responsible conduct encouraged by the app. Lacking this support network, the CWA exhibits a tendency to turn pandemic conduct into a private affair.

The paper develops this argument in three steps. First, it shows how principles of liberal governmentality were scripted into the app’s technological protocols as the outcome of a public controversy over the extent of state legibility. Second, the paper argues that the translation of these principles produced an unspecific risk notification for users. When app users sought advice and support from public health authorities, the unspecificity caused frictions in the administrative routines narrowing the options for responsible pandemic conduct. Third, the paper situates this friction within a broader atmosphere of political reluctance among political stakeholders to endorse the app.

Ctrl Alt Prepare

Johannes Oldervoll, University of Bergen

As the Norwegian pandemic, and its pandemic state wound down, a curious alliance between the National Institute of Public Health and its most vociferous critics: the intrusive measures introduced over the course of the pandemic had not been knowledge-based and very little had been done to strengthen the epidemiologist’s epistemic tool-kit over the course of the pandemic. It was not for lack of trying: the Institute had tried to introduce a “sensitive signalling system” in the form of a digital contact tracing app, but seen its epistemic ambitions dashed by the Data Protection Authority. Moreover, both policymakers and the regional ethical committees for medicine and health research had toppled the Institute’s efforts to ascend the evidentiary pyramid by means of large-scale randomized control trials.

Crises, failures, and breakdowns have long been imbued with the power to disclose, to reveal that which normally remains hidden, to unsettle received wisdom. In this essay, I conduct a close reading of the published advice of an expert group, appointed by the Inter-ministerial core group for a strengthened knowledge system for the management of crises. What does the appointed expert see when she scrutinizes the Norwegian health data ecosystem, looking for cracks and faultlines? What does she imagine when asked to draw these failures, weaknesses, breakdowns, and modest successes together in order to construct something that is better, more durable, more adaptive?

Pandemic Shifts: Following (non) Adaptation of Digital Tracing System in Moscow’s Smart City

Artem Pankin, Hunter College, City University of New York

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, smart cities became one of the main infrastructures where digital contact-tracing solutions were enforced (Das & Zhang, 2021; Sonn & Lee, 2020). However, these systems were not developed during the pandemic; rather, sociotechnical systems had been prepared for this for a long time. Hence, it is crucial to understand not only digital contact tracing development but also how current technological systems, especially smart cities, were prepared to implement them. Reflecting on the content analysis of 12 presentations from the Moscow Urban Forum from 2017 to 2021, I map how discourses around Moscow’s Smart City program changed during the pandemic. Using the Social Construction of Technology approach (Hommels, 2018; Pinch & Bijker, 2012), I identify two main technological frames of Moscow Smart City and follow how they close in one vision and later change in response to Covid-19. This paper specifically focused on the representation of surveillance technologies before and after (in 2021) in smart city vision, analyzing how the failure of Moscow’s digital tracing app (Orlova & Morris, 2021) at the beginning of the pandemic was discussed and (not) integrated into the smart city’s vision later. The study demonstrates that Covid-19 did not cause the implementation of surveillance technologies but reinforced existing development directions. The findings reveal how digital tracing systems are linked to bigger technological systems, such as smart cities, as well as ways of governing the city in general.

Corona-Warn-App, Luca and Beyond: The Story of Digital Contact Tracing in Germany

Gernot Rieder, University of Bergen / Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Europe in early 2020, German authorities soon started to look for technical solutions to deal with the looming health crisis, praising mobile contact tracing apps as a way to break infection chains and control the spread of the virus. It would, however, take months of heated public debate about the concrete technical implementation before then-Chancellor Angela Merkel could finally present the national Corona-Warn-App as a tool that “deserves [people’s] trust”. While the (hi-)story of the German Corona-Warn-App – which unlike most other European contact tracing applications is still being used and regularly updated in early 2023 – is arguably the most important case to discuss when considering the country’s digital contact tracing efforts, it is not the only one of note. The privately developed Luca app, for instance, was highly popular before cases of misuse of personal data became public, leading to a loss of licensing fees and repositioning of the app without COVID-19 tracing features. Drawing on these and a few other selected examples, this paper seeks to provide a concise overview of the digital contact tracing landscape in Germany, thereby focusing in particular on (i) the design choices made, (ii) the values and power dynamics involved, as well as (iii) the public’s reaction to the offered product, including people’s willingness to install and use the respective app. Looking ahead, the relative success of the German Corona-Warn-App now poses another tricky question: What to do with a well-received tracing app after the pandemic phase has ended?

The digital politics of contact tracing

Kjetil Rommetveit, University of Bergen Center for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities; with Niels van Dijk

The constitutional right to protection from interference in private life is classically framed as a relation between citizen (the rights holder) and the state (the protector of individual right). Through the state of exception introduced in response to the Covid pandemic, this relation was challenged through emergency powers granted to states, oftentimes closely collaborating with private companies. Digital contact tracing was introduced with the promise of better control over viral spread so that society could re-open. It also triggered dystopian imaginations of ever-closer surveillance through geo-tracking, centralised storage, real-time analytics and monitoring. Hence, digital contact tracing occasioned alignments and collaborations across politics, technology, public health and fundamental rights. During the first pandemic wave political and health authorities set out to develop contact tracing nationally. These efforts foundered on grounds simultaneously technical and legal, which were to some extent addressed in the second generation of contact tracing tools. Technical limitations were addressed through the partnership between Google and Apple, overcoming previous boundaries to communication between the iOS and Android systems. And, this technological merger enabled privacy by design, in-built protections of fundamental rights in accordance with European legislation (GDPR, Art 25), which became a main source of legitimation for these tools. Whereas this put dystopian fears to rest, sovereign powers and right protections were displaced into international private digital networks, regulations and infrastructures. In this talk we present the case of national apps as, providing insight into digital politics, including state sovereignty and protections of rights.

The social life of Koronavilkku

Laura Savolainen and Sonja Trifuljesko, University of Helsinki

In this paper, we examine the social life of the Finnish Covid-19 exposure notification application, Koronavilkku. Koronavilkku was released to the general public at the end of August 2020 and was discontinued at the beginning of June 2022. The app obtained extreme popularity within the first 24 hours of its launch, being downloaded one million times in a country of 5.5 million people. The peak was reached within the next few months, with up to 2.5 million users of Koronavilkku in Finland. Not long thereafter, the numbers began to dwindle, while citizens and healthcare professionals started publicly casting their doubt in the app’s usefulness. Yet, the app’s issuers and developers remained adamant of Koronavilkku’s overall effectiveness, and the eventual discontinuation of the app went almost completely as it had been originally planned. We use this ambivalent framing of Koronavilkku both as a success and a failure to explore the shifting expectations and affordances of digital contact tracing. Drawing on documentary material and interviews with the app’s designers (public health authority and tech company representatives) and users (citizens and public health professionals), we examine uncertainties and anxieties that arise from the attempts to meet societal ends with technical means. Furthermore, we interrogate the ways in which new social relations forged by such endeavors, namely public-private partnerships, affect how questions over civic values become defined. In doing so, we foreground diverse ways in which digital contact tracing manifests across social spaces.

Organizers

Nicolas Baya-Laffite, Céline Cholez, and Kjetil Rommetveit