We do this by drawing on the Australian government’s AI Ethics Principles. This article considers these issues with reference to the COVIDSafe app being used in Australia. The aim should be to ensure that technologies presented as being in the public interest are utilised in a manner that is proportionate to the threat to which they are responding and consistent with the values of the society in which they are operating. It is, accordingly, important to think very carefully at the outset about the design, deployment and governance of any digital technologies used for contact tracing and other responses to COVID-19. Equally, the complexity and relative novelty of these technologies make it both difficult to scrutinise and easy to extend their operation. 7 The combination of data collection and predictive analytics enabled by new digital technologies and advances in computing capacity offer a rich source of information that has hitherto been unimaginable. However, they also raise concerns 5 about the potential for such technologies to erode individuals’ rights to privacy and expand the scope of surveillance by governments, 6 and technology companies. These uses of digital technologies for contact tracing, contagion tracking and other forms of COVID-19 monitoring are ostensibly focused on public health outcomes. Indeed, the use of digital technologies for monitoring the health status of individuals is likely to be important in managing any return to ‘normal’ public life. 4 As we move through different stages of the pandemic, reliance on technologies for public health purposes is unlikely to wane. Current uses include mobile phone contact tracing apps that identify who people have come into contact with, 2 CCTV cameras and facial recognition technology to monitor the location of people supposed to be in isolation, 3 and GPS data to monitor large gatherings which may develop into virus hot spots. 1 These technology-based interventions vary in the degree to which they intrude on individual privacy and the extent to which they utilise sophisticated algorithms or artificial intelligence (AI). Across the world new digital technologies are being presented as a key to controlling the spread of COVID-19 and promoting public health.
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