Assessing Connections and Tradeoffs Between Geospatial Data Ethics, Privacy, and the Effectiveness of Digital Contact Tracing Technologies

Contact tracing, a useful public health tool that aids in the identification of individuals who may have come into contact with a person known to be infected with a disease, has been identified as key to the mitigation and suppression of COVID-19. Effective contact tracing allows public health authorities to sever chains of transmission and shift policy to case-based interventions such as selective individual quarantines rather than population-wide interventions such as social distancing. While public health authorities have the ability to conduct manual contact tracing, many do not have the capacity to identify and trace infected individuals at the scale or speed needed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. To improve the reach and effectiveness of contact tracing, many are proposing to expand contact tracing capacity by introducing digital contact tracing technologies that use the geospatial tracking technologies (e.g., GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth) embedded in mobile devices to gather, store, transfer, and share the location and contact histories of individuals. This chapter examines contact tracing, its potential extension using geospatial technologies, and the tradeoffs between privacy and effectiveness that may arise as these systems are developed and deployed to address COVID-19. By identifying linkages between the potential capabilities of these technologies and ethical and privacy principles of geospatial data handling, we introduce a framework for assessing conflicts between privacy and effectiveness. This framework is needed if we are to hold an informed public discussion of two critical questions. First, how the potential spread of geospatial contact tracing technologies may impact the institutional structures of society. Second, how societal processes might change the form geospatial contact tracing technologies take and the role we intend for them to play.