Research pick: Contact tracing privacy - "New digital public health tools: privacy by design in contact tracing mobile apps for COVID-19"

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic led to misery for many millions of people and the tragedy of countless untimely deaths. In the midst of the pandemic, communications technology came to the fore as people were forced to work and learn from home, were isolated from friends, family, and colleagues, and often wholly restricted in their movements with respect to shopping, entertainment, and other activities. Tools that allowed us to access information and engage with other people became more popular than ever before and widespread at least in those parts of the world with the requisite infrastructure.

One particular type of tool was more about controlling the disease than allowing us to cope with the “new normal” and that was the contact-tracing application. Writing in the International Journal of Public Sector Performance Management, a team from Slovenia discusses how these applications allowed the health authorities and governments to alert individuals to disease risk if they had been in contact with other people known to be infected with the SARS-CoV-2. The alert would then allow the at-risk individuals to test and isolate as appropriate.

There were various contact-tracing apps that used different approaches to determine how close and for how long a person had been near an infected individual and in what setting. They all had their pros and cons, as with every kind of software. There were also concerns regarding privacy and the sharing of data that were considered in more detail in the development of some of these applications and perhaps not others.

Boštjan Koritnik of the University of Ljubljana and Peter Merc Lemur Legal point out that many of the issues that arose did so because the adoption of technological advances in the public sector usually takes a lot longer than in the private sector because there are checks and balances to be considered in the assessment of new technologies. However, the sudden and acute demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, meant that the public sector, particularly with regard to healthcare and our coping with the pandemic, had to work that much faster than usual so that more timely interventions could be put in place.

The different approaches to contact privacy in contact tracing apps were meant to balance individual privacy with the requirements of public healthcare requirements. There were many legal and ethical considerations to be made, whether or not these were fully considered and addressed is a moot point. Ultimately, the team suggests that the design of such applications in the future or the development of current software should put privacy at the centre of the design process. Indeed, privacy by design, they assert, should be applied as a minimum standard for government-approved tracking apps. The future might be to exploit the distributed and immutable blockchain technology to ensure privacy and data security by design is embedded from the start in such apps.

Koritnik, B. and Merc, P. (2022) ‘New digital public health tools: privacy by design in contact tracing mobile apps for COVID-19’, Int. J. Public Sector Performance Management, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp.399–410.