JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital contact tracing algorithms (DCTAs)have emerged as ubiquitous phenomenon throughout the pandemic of SARS-CoV 2. The ethical impact of DCTAs has been discussed especially with reference to users’ autonomy privacy and as a potential threat to informational self-determination. An important part of ethical evaluations of DCTAs is to develop understanding of their information flow and their contextual situatedness to be able to ethically evaluate questions of privacy.

Objective:

This paper presents an exemplary empirical ethics analysis of contextual factors of two different DCTAs Secondly, implications for the ethical question of privacy are discussed.

Methods:

We conducted a comparative case study of the algorithm of the Google Apple Exposure notification framework (GAEFN) as exemplified in the German Corona Warn App (CWA) and the Japanese CIRCLE algorithm with the guiding questions as to How a social encounter is represented within the algorithms of DCTAs, and 2) how different representations from different cultural backgrounds relate to prevalent structures and concepts of their context of creation.

Results:

Our analysis shows that both algorithms use the idea of representing a social encounter of two subjects. These subjects are gain significance in terms of risk against the background of their temporal and spatial properties. However, the comparative analysis reveals at least two major differences. GAEFN clearly prioritizes temporality over spatiality. The representation of spatiality on the other hand is reduced to mere distance without any direction or orientation. The CIRCLE-framework on the other hand, prioritizes spatiality over temporality. To our understanding, these different concepts and prioritizations can be seen to align with important cultural differences in considering basic concepts like subject, time and space in eastern and western thought.

Conclusions:

The differences noted in this work essentially lead to two different normative questions of privacy that are raised against the respective backgrounds. Ethical evaluation has to be aware of these differences to avoid culturally insensitive approaches.