South Africa’s technologies enhancing contact tracing for Covid-19: A human rights and techno-politics assessment

Abstract This paper assesses South Africa’s recent development and actual use of digital health surveillance tools from a comparative and human rights perspective. We first summarise the debate and emerging evidence regarding whether and how digital health surveillance tools could assist the public health response to the pandemic. Here, we develop a tentative integrated analysis of the intersecting human rights implications of these tools. Our assessment of South Africa’s actual use of digital health technologies to combat the pandemic then interweaves two themes. First, South Africa’s abrupt and still largely unexplained decision to abandon the original Tracing Database, while clearly in line with global trends in constraining the ambit of covid apps to preserve privacy, may have missed the opportunity to develop and deploy a more effective but still rights-protective model for digital health surveillance. Second, and conversely, South Africa’s approach to developing the Tracing Database, including its laudable and innovative oversight structure, reflects a troubling lack of engagement with relevant stakeholders, including human rights and community groups, as well as the private sector. It also reflects a limited public capacity to assess relevant technologies and to partner both with those stakeholders and the private sector in a genuine private/public space.