Stupid, Evil, or Both? Understanding the Smittestopp conflict
This addresses privacy and governance issues in public health technology for policymakers and citizens, but it is incremental as it analyzes a specific case without proposing new solutions.
The paper examines the failure of Norway's COVID-19 contact tracing app, Smittestopp, which was discontinued after four months due to widespread criticism over privacy intrusions, analyzing the conflict where opposing sides viewed each other as stupid or evil.
Like many governments, the Norwegian government provided a contact tracing application to help in combating the COVID-19 pandemic at its outset. However, the application was widely criticized for enabling an unacceptable intrusion into its subjects' lives, leading to its discontinuation only four months into the pandemic. In this essay, we will take a closer look at what went wrong, attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the passionate nature of the conflict, and how both sides came to view the other as being either stupid, or evil, or both.