Beyond legislation and technological design: The importance and implications of institutional trust for privacy issues of digital contact tracing

For proper implementation of digital contact tracing technologies for fighting against SARS-CoV-2, participants' privacy vulnerability and the uncertainty from the relevant institutions' side could be seen as two core elements that should be dealt with, among others. In this paper, we propose to understand the current approaches for preserving...

Ethics of Trust­-Inviting Digital Systems: Blockchain, Reputation­-Based Platforms, and COVID­19 Tracing Technologies

In the past decade, rapid shifting and evolving technological systems that take trust as part of the design objective (call such systems “trust-inviting systems”) have incredibly transformed the way we interact with others. Think of reputation-based platforms mediating interactions between strangers and other digital services provided by...

Societal Effects Are a Major Factor for the Uptake of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Digital Contact Tracing App in The Netherlands

Objectives: Our study investigates the extent to which uptake of a COVID-19 digital contact-tracing (DCT) app among the Dutch population is affected by its configurations, its societal effects, and government policies toward such an app. Methods: We performed a discrete choice experiment among Dutch adults including 7 attributes, that is, who...

Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?

Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not solely to maximise the ratio of...