Identifying and Mitigating Humanitarian Challenges to COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Abstract

COVID-19 contact tracing has rapidly emerged as a dynamic field of endeavor, with different countries taking different approaches, both politically and technologically. In this paper we examine the situation of Australia’s development of a COVID-19 contact tracing application (which is in reality a proximity tracing application) as a case-study. Both technological and societal elements are considered, in particular, the delivery of poor protection, or the perception of poor protection, of privacy and civil liberties to negatively impact the adoption of such an application, and thus hamper its potential.The rest of the paper explores this digital-politic nexus and tensions within crisis response, and examines the trade-off can be improved through increasing public trust of such technologies by improving their actual and perceived privacy and human rights properties without reducing their medical effectiveness. Lessons for humanitarian organizations are extracted from this.