Olivia Gambelin

Although COVID-19 is not the world’s first pandemic, we do have a novel tool in the belt to help us fight it: technology. However, if we are going to unlock the full potential of this tool, we need to integrate ethical principles into the tech being developed to combat the virus.

Over the past month we‘ve seen a variety of different hackathons, funds, and campaigns all targeted at focusing the tech community on finding innovative solutions to help combat the spread of the virus. It may be amazing to see so many rallying to rapidly turn out powerful tech tools, however having such expedited innovation and development cycles does not come without its costs and concerns. As the tech ethics community quickly pointed out, the solutions being offered are not necessarily the best possible solutions when it comes to respecting ethical principles.

The Tradeoff Illusion: Would you like privacy or health with your tech? The initial response of tech to COVID-19 took the direction of surveillance technology as organizations looked to harness the power of data tracking in order to slow the spread of the virus. We saw as countries like South Korea launched the use of a tool that tracked where an infected person had been and who they had come into contact with, and China utilized drones to track people breaking quarantine and order them to return home. At first, Western countries responded with outrage at such blatant defiance of their concept of privacy, eventually blaming the use of such extreme surveillance technology on the influence of Eastern culture and authoritarian states. However, it wasn’t long before we saw the adoption of similar technology in Western countries. For example, footage from a Derbyshire drone mimics what we saw from the Chinese and companies like Unacast in the US started using cellphone tracking to create social distancing scoreboards.

Since the initial response of tech to COVID-19 took the direction of surveillance technology, we have been cornered into thinking we must trade our privacy for our health. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, when asked to choose between health and privacy, we will almost unanimously choose health but that this forced decision is actually a false choice. We have been led to think that privacy and health is not an ‘and’ situation, only an ‘or’ that has serious consequences either way.

Again, this is a false choice. The situation has been framed with the idea that either privacy or health can be the end goal and that only one end can exist at a time. However, what happens when we reframe it so that health is the end goal and privacy is only one of many means to that end? Think of it this way, we are using technology to achieve the end goal of health and the technology we use can either respect privacy or invade privacy. When we reframe the situation in this light, suddenly privacy becomes a means to the end goal of health, it is no longer canceling it out. This is what Harari means by the choice between privacy or health being false, the true choice is actually whether we will use technology that respects privacy or not in order to achieve health.

Caught in a Cycle of Mistrust Why was surveillance tech, the cause of this tradeoff illusion between privacy and health, the go-to solution in the first place? We can of course offer a multitude of speculations as an answer here but one of the main causes that can be identified is the growing lack of trust we have seen in the modern tech era. This is not a new problem but the COVID-19 crisis has provided the perfect environment to foster fear and so highlight this growing issue of mistrust.

Let’s break it down. Right now, there is an astounding amount of confusion around the virus. From countries suddenly closing borders, to the speed of misinformation about the severity of the virus, to the lack of alignment in a global response; it is safe to say that uncertainty has been a common theme. With the rise of mass confusion, it has become difficult to decipher the fake news from the facts, which in turn misguides public trust. This constant confusion fuels mistrust in governance and leadership, creating an environment where people are less likely to follow direction. As Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore, explained in an interview with CNN , if the people do not trust in you, then the measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are difficult to implement.

In order to ensure that the public is following directions put in place to help stop the spread of the virus, the use of surveillance technology has appeared to be the solution. This kind of tech, especially contact tracking, can be used for good, such as to understand what areas will be hit hardest by the virus and therefore allowing medical resources to be proactively dispatched to those areas. However, it is unclear to what extent people are being tracked, how much information the government really has, and for how long these measures will continue. This kind of surveillance tech causes concern and confusion around personal data and privacy. In other words, it causes the public to mistrust the technology and the government’s use of it, leading us right back into the loop of mistrust.

It goes like this: the public mistrusts the information from government, causing a disregard for official orders. This leads to government not trusting the general public and to seek the use of surveillance tech, that in turn causes further mistrust from the public, and so on. We are caught in a cycle of mistrust, which is only heightened by the use of surveillance technology.

The Solution: Tech Ethicists to Support COVID-19 Tech Developers We are already in a time of immense fear and uncertainty, why would we want to feed this by intensifying this cycle of mistrust with technology that is clearly in violation of the ethical principles we worked so hard to establish?

As we’ve seen, we are in fact not caught between the decision of health versus privacy. This is a false choice that’s been forced onto to us by the widespread uptake of questionable surveillance tech. Despite how it may seem at first, it is possible to create technology that helps track the spread of the virus and yet still protects the ethical principle of privacy. Creating technology that we can trust is the only answer to breaking the current cycle we are stuck in and ensuring that the technology we are developing today will not lead to an existential crisis of ethics tomorrow.

You’re probably now asking yourself how this is possible? In normal times, I would advise to develop ethical protocols designed to stimulate innovation while still protecting ethical principles. However, we are in crisis mode now, which means we don’t have time to establish these essential protocols. If we are going to be creating responsible, trustworthy technology for tomorrow, we need the solutions today.

So instead I advise you to turn to the tech ethics community for support in this time of unprecedented digital transformation. Tech Ethicists are trained to spot ethical risks before those risks cause exponentially bigger problems down the line, problems that will extend far beyond the current crisis. This means an ethicist can offer real-time advice on difficult ethical decisions that must be made during the development of COVID-19 tech, resulting in more responsible technology and breaking the toxic cycle of mistrust.

Furthermore, Tech Ethicists have invaluable experience in using ethical principles as strict standards throughout the entire lifecycle of a technical project. The use of these principles as guidelines for technological development has been proven to result in not only an increase in innovation, but also more robust solutions. This means that by abiding by ethical principles, such as privacy, during the innovation and development cycles of COVID-19 tech, we are able to achieve our end goal of health while still respecting the concept of privacy we so value. In other words, an ethicist can help break the mindset that we are stuck in choosing either health or privacy and instead support developers and engineers in creating technology that does both.

Ethics is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human, let’s not allow the pandemic to take that from us as well. We deserve to be able to have both our health and our privacy respected.

We deserve tech we can trust.

Olivia Gambelin

San Francisco Bay Area 10K followers 500+ connections

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OG Speaking and Advisory

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