Ethical Concerns
- Diarmid Mackenzie
- Adam Hollowell (Unlicensed)
- Diarmid Mackenzie (Unlicensed)
Table of child pages:
Some other resources…
A good read for thinking about some Ethical concerns relating to the project
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/inaccurate-and-insecure-why-contact-tracing-apps-could-be-a-disaster/
In particular, as we engineer to reduce False Positives & False Negatives, we should be sensitive to the fact that the factors that cause these are not distributed evenly within the population.
Poorer, already-disadvantaged communities may naturally be more prone to false positives & false negatives. We should target efforts to improve rates for those communities, and not just pick “low hanging fruit” that may tend to improve the rates for more privileged communities.
An article published in the BMJ by UK epidemiologists on the ethics of contact tracing apps. Doesn’t ay much - mostly just justifies them on the basis that the reduction in COVID harm far outweighs most privacy concerns.
May be a useful reference, though.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2020/05/05/medethics-2020-106314.full.pdf
A useful resource for efforts to build an Ethical Model:
https://www.mironov.com/ethics/
Comments/Links from @Adam Hollowell (Unlicensed)
arXiv at Cornell University has a COVID-19 quick search that you may find useful if you haven’t encountered it yet.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/arxiv/2020/03/30/new-covid-19-quick-search/
Their database provided these articles relevant for ethics. Will read and follow up.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.13691.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04343.pdf
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2004/2004.10236.pdf
This may be a helpful way of articulating what open source DCT providers to HAs should do if it is not clear that the HA is complying with the standards. I doubt you’d want to implement this “Hippocratic License” directly, but the concepts might help write a stated policy on HA misuse of DCT.
https://www.wired.com/story/open-source-license-requires-users-do-no-harm/
Re: Incentives, PathCheck is not research, but we could use human subject research ethics as a guideline for providing incentives principles to HAs that we work with. It would be fairly straightforward to write a statement of principles re: incentives that are distributed/required for partnering HAs. For example, Grant and Sugarman (2010) identify the following potential areas of problems for incentives in Human Subject Research: “Specifically, incentives become problematic when conjoined with the following factors, singly or in combination with one another: where the subject is in a dependency relationship with the researcher, where the risks are particularly high, where the research is degrading, where the participant will only consent if the incentive is relatively large because the participant’s aversion to the study is strong, and where the aversion is a principled one.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03605310490883046
On surveillance and protests re: DCT. The JHU student cites this article from April 29, 2020 but doesn’t do anything substantial with it in their report.
Matthew Guariglia, the author, has written a few other pieces since April that are helpful. We should keep an eye on his work and others at EFF as the protests continue to unfold in the US.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/how-identify-visible-and-invisible-surveillance-protests
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/dont-mix-policing-covid-19-contact-tracing
https://www.eff.org/issues/covid-19
One challenge under equity/fairness will be smartphone access. Only 81% of Americans own smartphones, so nearly 1 in 5 Americans won’t have access to DCTT in that way. That number may be higher or lower based on the other locations PathCheck serves. The JHU framework recommends “directing more non-DCTT resources and efforts toward those communities” where DCTT isn’t accessible. PathCheck obviously can’t take on the service of those communities, but you may have an ethical principle or recommendation to HAs not to overlook communities/individuals that don’t have smartphones. Part of indicating “Supportive” on this might include asking HAs to commit “analog” contact tracing resources to communities where smartphone usage is lower.