A socio-technical framework for digital contact tracing
This addresses the need for decision-makers to balance public health and privacy in contact tracing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concerns and guidelines.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating digital contact tracing apps for COVID-19 by proposing a framework that assesses impact on users, technology, and governance, and applied it to three apps and EDPB guidelines to highlight limitations.
In their efforts to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, decision makers are considering the development and use of smartphone applications for contact tracing. Even though these applications differ in technology and methods, there is an increasing concern about their implications for privacy and human rights. Here we propose a framework to evaluate their suitability in terms of impact on the users, employed technology and governance methods. We illustrate its usage with three applications, and with the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) guidelines, highlighting their limitations.