IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021 - 43

having a digital divide in which access to digital
technology is limited for rather big parts of the population.
Some people still have old versions of mobile
phones which can't download this app. A recent
report shows that a considerable proportion of the
population-those aged over 65-have very limited
digital skills; for them, downloading an app would
be a very difficult task. For the same part of the population,
it June be hard to have a clear sense of the
relevancy of this app, its limits and benefits.
JP: From my point of view, complementing those
social and contextual factors, there are some political
ones. Essentially, these are down to structural
weakness due to an emphasis on an ideological
form of government that holds the commitment to
centralization rather than regionalization. The need
for local government to be involved in the decision
making and the implementation has been clear from
the start, but those actors have been underfunded
and cut out of the loop. There's a tension between
outsourcing everything to private organizations versus
engaging all stakeholders. We don't have corruption
in the U.K., but we do seem to have an awful lot
of " consultancy. "
Another dimension is what happens in a country
that has experienced a lot of, largely manufactured,
culture wars. These arguments over conflicted cultural
issues mean that the wearing of face masks isn't
interpreted as a matter of public health but taken as
a marker of which side of a political divide you're
on. We have a real breakdown in the relationship
between the demos-the people-and the rulers.
We have a government that is deliberately exploiting
and polarizing divides, with the result of alienating
half the population, when what this crisis requires is
buy-in from the whole population. Separating your
appeal by voter segments disables the collective
action which is most called for.
Finally, we are experiencing a complete lack of
accountability, without responsibility being taken
for mistakes. One of the founding principles of democratic
regimes is the ability to " fail forward " -as
in the saying that all political careers end in failure.
Well, you could say the same thing about all political
regimes. The key component of failing forward
is that you learn from those mistakes, that is what
gives you systemic improvement. But where a government
is in denial about the mistakes it has made
and seeking to blame everyone else for what went
June 2021
wrong, including the public whose buy-in you need,
well, this is just a recipe for systemic failure.
SW: Following on from Jeremy's remarks about
the politicizing of this crisis, some of the most heated
debates in relation to this pandemic are about balancing
health with the economy, and this is often
presented as a binary choice, as a zero-sum game.
Responses to the pandemic are often framed in
terms of striking a balance between differing values
and priorities. How can we maintain or strike a good
balance between the effective use of these test and
trace mechanisms, alongside the protection of citizens'
fundamental rights, such as data privacy?
MT: As I was saying before, the first step is to
understand that such a balance is feasible. We must
recognize that privacy is a fundamental right, not
an absolute right, and we already have regulations
that acknowledge this balancing. In the case of this
pandemic, the balancing includes the readiness to
revert towards greater privacy when the pandemic
ends. And it requires having appropriate measures
to revert to the status quo ante, like mechanisms to
ensure accountability, as Jeremy pointed out.
These measures are important to show that the
limitations on rights that the apps pose are meant
to be temporary and proportionate, and that they
are motivated by the need to address the crisis and
would not pose medium- or long-term hazard for our
democracies. These measures include full transparency
of processes and fundamental accountability,
so if something goes wrong, there won't only be a
punishment to those who made a mistake but also
an understanding of where and how the mistake
happened, and how not to repeat it. This provides
a means of learning and improving, with a clear
understanding of the benefits we want to achieve
and the strategy for getting there.
Taking as an example the first version of the
app, one of the reasons put forward for not using
a more distributed approach was the epidemiologists'
need for data collection. But then the epidemiologists
themselves said, in fact, these data are
not sufficiently clean and they're not so relevant
insofar as they rested on self-diagnosis rather than
a test. Citizens should be given the reasons why a
specific technical solution is designed in a certain
way, and that reasoning should stand up to scientific
proof, ethical, and legal scrutiny. Each of these is an
important component in undertaking what is a multi-dimensional
task. It's not simply " privacy versus
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021

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