Contact-tracing apps and alienation in the age of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Using a core idea of critical social theory, alienation, we interrogate the failure in the design and adoption of a Stop-COVID app in France. We analyse the political and scientific discourse, to develop an understanding of the conditions giving rise to this failure in this unprecedented moment. We argue that the digital-first solutionist approach taken by the government failed because, as in all Western countries, most stakeholders were alienated from the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and lacked concrete knowledge of it. Furthermore, the French government and its COVID-19 council excluded relevant scientific experts in favour of quantitative modelling based on abstract partial knowledge. This along with coercion and lack of transparency about the app, reinforced alienation, undermined effectiveness in managing the crisis and resulted in the digital design failure. We suggest that such alienation will prevail in the COVID-19 era characterised by regimes of control, rampant abusive location tracking, and data collection, and where public officials are more concerned with managing effects than seeking causal explanations. The digital-first solutionist approach was adopted, not because digital solutions (to contact tracing) are superior to traditional ones, but by default due to alienation and lack of interdisciplinary cooperation.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Pär Ågerfalk
• Kieran Conboy
• Michael Myers

KEYWORDS:

• Contact-tracing app
• COVID-19
• alienation
• digital solutionism
• interdisciplinary cooperation

Acknowledgement

We thank Jean-Claude Boldrini, Kieran Conboy, Maguelone Destang, Bertrand Rowe, Lucas Introna and public health specialists for their helpful comments on this paper and useful discussion on the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The doctrine was finally amended on April 27, with a decree authorising the sale of masks in pharmacy and newsagent stores. This event relates points to the lack of reassessment processes, and the failure to include diverse and international findings on the scientific state of the art.

2. Government and their big tech allies alienate us by designing contact-tracing apps with criteria (<1 metre; and > 15 minutes contact) insufficient for controlling danger and yet generate numerous false positives. And when they justify their criteria based on public health testing capacity limitations, instead of setting design criteria based correct knowledge of the virus transmission dynamics (≤ 8 metres; and ≤30 minutes contact).

3. The Norwegian contact-tracing app had a particularly intrusive centralised design. It captured real-time location data of individuals by GPS in a central database. Machine learning was used to analyse the data for 30 days intervals to account for socio-technical and environmental conditions and map the paths of individuals. The app would have enabled the government to identify potential contacts via airborne transmission from the recorded paths of infected persons. However, outcry over the digital surveillance from citizens led to its withdrawal.