Meals, drugs, and cardboard oars… and other musings on technology during COVID-19
I was recently asked to respond to a couple of questions for a DEVEX article on Tracking COVID-19: What are the implications for privacy and human rights?
My responses went something like this.
Do you have concerns that people are becoming accepting of digital intrusion into their personal lives? How do you think COVID has impacted this or accelerated it?
One way to think about this is that, some people accept digital technologies into their lives as a person would their next meal (e.g., communication technologies, assistive technologies).
Some people accept digital technologies as a drug addict would their next fix (e.g., digital dopamine economy, persuasive technologies)
Some people accept digital technologies as a drowning person would a cardboard oar (e.g., ICT4D industrial complex, dataveillance).
What is concerning in all these three scenarios are the injustices that are perpetrated and the unfreedoms that are unleashed through the digital technologies.
The first scenario represents technology use as supporting our everyday lives. While the digital technologies provide a real utility and value-add to people’s lives, the injustice in this is that there are also harmful technologies, for example, that are not ethically designed or that perpetuate injustice. In this case, people need to be aware of the good and the bad and be critical of the technologies that they bring into their lives. Technology developers need to be ethically trained (i.e., more ethics courses in computer science degrees) and held to account (e.g., a la Technologist’s Hippocratic Oath).
The second scenario represents the growing problem of technology addiction and technology fetishism. The injustice in this scenario is the loss of agency and freedom that people experience in being “controlled” by technology as well as being exploited by Big Tech. There are huge industries and well-resourced software development efforts that are aimed at ensuring that people remain glued to their devices for longer (e.g., to increase ARPU).
The use of digital technologies for fighting COVID-19 represent more of the third scenario, which is characterized by a level of “desperation”. In such contexts, people will most likely take whatever you throw at them, including apps with clear privacy violations and apps that expose individuals to risks, as long as there’s the promise of solving their problem. That is not to suggest that some of these technologies are not effective — much as a well fabricated cardboard oar might be effective in saving someone from drowning. However, what the situation demands is much more than the digital technologies. Unfortunately, there is also no shortage of tech evangelists who are still preaching technology as the panacea for some of these deep, complex, and messy problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
You mention a fine line between the bad guys and good — what are the examples of where you see “good guys” risking cyber freedom to combat COVID-19?
The fine line between the good guys and bad guys is in reference specifically to increasing dataveillance. Around the world, Big tech and governments are collecting huge amounts of data on citizens. There are narratives that that tend to glorify certain actors (i.e., “good guys”) and to vilify others (i.e., “bad guys”).
So, for example, one government might be vilified for the overt mass surveillance of its citizens, and in the times of COVID-19 be glorified for employing the same surveillance infrastructure for containing the pandemic; or a government with similar, yet sophisticated and covert, mass surveillance capabilities not be vilified.
Overall, the good guys are those who use citizens data, in times of COVID-19 and beyond, in ways that are generally consistent with data justice principles.
What demands should citizens be making of its government?
There are political negotiations that happen between citizens and their governments that results in very different and diverse configurations of governance around the world. Different nations also structure their priorities and values in a myriad of ways — for example, between national security, stability, peace, freedom, civil liberties, economic prosperity, military power, and harmony.
A situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic primarily tests the resilience of nations — with resilience defined as the ability to bounce back (i.e., recover, restore) and bounce forward (i.e., adapt) in times of adversity.
Citizen’s should therefore be holding their governments accountable for recovery and adaptation. For some countries, this means holding governments accountable to restore the civil liberties and freedoms that might get compromised in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. For others, the emphasis might be on demanding that the government maintains stability (e.g., social, economic, health), even at cost to, say, civil liberties.
Do the challenges of digital privacy and cyber freedom in the COVID world differ between developed and developing nations? How?
Firstly, we must introduce the notion of “context integrity” before we talk about privacy and freedom. Citizen share their data within very specific contexts (e.g., on social media, on a personal website) with specific associated norms, practices, and expectations. The use of data from one context to another can violate the context integrity of the data because different contexts are associated with different privacy and freedom expectations. Therefore, with COVID-19, citizens might be willing to forego certain levels of privacy and freedom and to allow for their data to be used, but ONLY in the fight against the pandemic.
Secondly, digital privacy and cyber freedom mean different things to different people, communities, and countries — and so country level comparisons tend to always be problematic.
Having said that, I see two key challenges, alluded to earlier, associated with digital privacy and cyber freedom in the COVID-19 world. One is the challenge of protecting citizens privacy and freedom in the data technologies (e.g., symptoms checking apps, contact tracing apps, data analytics) that are being deployed to fight the pandemic. The second is restoring citizen’s privacy and freedom, in cases where there were “inevitable” encroachments, after the pandemic.
The countries that will do well on these two challenges are those that have good governance, and that value civil liberties around digital privacy and cyber freedoms (e.g., with strong data protection legislation, and ethical technology design principles). The Human Development Index (comprising the economy, education, and health sub-indices) might be a reasonable proxy for these factors, in which case one would expect to see some differences that correlate with the HDI.
However, what the pandemic has clearly demonstrated thus far is that it pays no respect to the HDI.
Why is this an important issue for you to speak out about?
Freedom endows us with substantive opportunities and choices to live the kind of lives that we may have reason to value, whether at home, at work, in public spaces, or online. The risks against our cyber freedoms have been heightened during this COVID-19 pandemic. It is our responsibility, as citizens and societies, to protect these freedoms and to enhance our cyber resilience, along with our overall multi-dimensional resilience.
