ArticleScience and engineering ethics2021
Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing.
Article in Science and engineering ethics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cultural Implications Regarding Privacy in Digital Contact Tracing Algorithms: Method Development and Empirical Ethics Analysis of a German and a Japanese Approach to Contact Tracing.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Governing digital crisis responses: platform standards and the dilemma of COVID-19 contact tracing.Journal of business economics · 2023Article
- ["Sending a signal of solidarity via bluetooth?"-A medical ethical analysis of the public debate on the Corona-Warn-App].Ethik in der Medizin : Organ der Akademie fur Ethik in der Medizin · 2023Article
- Sovereignty in the Digital and Contact Tracing Apps.Digital society : ethics, socio-legal and governance of digital technology · 2023Article
- Public Attitudes Regarding Trade-offs Between the Functional Aspects of a Contact-Confirming App for COVID-19 Infection Control and the Benefits to Individuals and Public Health: Cross-sectional Survey.JMIR formative research · 2022Article
- User perceptions about sharing exposure notification information for communicable diseases.Frontiers in digital health · 2022Article
- Beyond legislation and technological design: The importance and implications of institutional trust for privacy issues of digital contact tracing.Frontiers in digital health · 2022Review
- Tracing app technology: an ethical review in the COVID-19 era and directions for post-COVID-19.Ethics and information technology · 2022Review
- Evaluating the Dynamics of Bluetooth Low Energy Based COVID-19 Risk Estimation for Educational Institutes.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- [On the ethics of corona apps].Ethik in der Medizin : Organ der Akademie fur Ethik in der Medizin · 2021Article
- Lessons Learned in Piloting a Digital Personalized COVID-19 "Radar" on a University Campus.Public health reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are "privacy preserving by design". We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.