Apple, Google, and governments around the world are cooking up a new way to trace where you’ve been and who you’ve talked to. Sound like Big Brother? It may actually help you to love your neighbor.

Contact tracing is the next major conversation in the fight against COVID-19. Manual methods have long been a proven strategy for containing health epidemics. Now, in the smartphone era, like everything else, contact tracing is going digital.

Digital contact tracing may have some inherent risks though. The prospect raises numerous ethical and privacy issues—questions that every smartphone user may eventually face.

What should Christians do? And what responsibility does big government and big business have if we say yes? Fortunately, some countries are already a few steps ahead, and we can learn a from their lead.

Links

Read more about Seoul’s approach to contact tracing in this New Yorker article and this Slate podcast episode. And see more of what’s happening in Singapore.

NPR explains how a proximity app, like the one Google and Apple are proposing, would work.

In this video, All Tech Is Human talked with one company that already created a proximity app, as well as the ethicist and founder of AI Ethics Lab.

Santa Clara University summarizes 4 views people have on contact tracing, specifically as it relates to privacy.

The UK Telegraph outlines some different ways proximity apps could work, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests some guiding principles for how these apps should be designed. Harvard Law Today weighs in too.

WIRED offers a more technical analysis surrounding the privacy questions.

Image: Robinraj Premchand from Pixabay

TALK BACK

Follow Device & Virtue on Instagram and Twitter.

Follow Chris and Adam on Twitter.

Support Device & Virtue. Learn how.