Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing
| Autor: | Lucie White, Philippe van Basshuysen |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Risk analysis
Risk medicine.medical_specialty Health (social science) Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Efficacy Policy making Internet privacy Information Storage and Retrieval 0603 philosophy ethics and religion HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine Management of Technology and Innovation mental disorders medicine Humans 030212 general & internal medicine Health policy Dewey Decimal Classification::500 | Naturwissenschaften Data ethics Original Research/Scholarship Focus (computing) Digital Technology business.industry SARS-CoV-2 Public health Health Policy COVID-19 06 humanities and the arts Mobile Applications Digital contact tracing Privacy preserving Issues ethics and legal aspects Privacy 060301 applied ethics Business Public Health Smartphone ddc:500 Contact Tracing Contact tracing Confidentiality |
| Zdroj: | Science and Engineering Ethics 27 (2021), Nr. 2 Science and Engineering Ethics |
| Popis: | At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies. Volkswagen Foundation Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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