4 minute read
the july 31 release of canada’s covid alert app was greeted with almost universal praise. privacy experts applauded its strong privacy protections, echoing the official app website ’s extensive detailing of how “your privacy is protected,” including a link to an entire other page that explains “how covid alert protects your privacy,” which in turn links to health canada’s privacy assessment of the app .
more troubling, the app was released without anyone having created a framework for evaluating its success. instead, health canada is currently deciding how to evaluate it , meaning it was released without anyone having a clear idea about what they wanted it to do, and now anything it does can be treated as a success.
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the logic , meanwhile, reports that liberal digital government minister joyce murray says that the government doesn’t have “a particular threshold below which it considers the app to be ineffective.”
the program will follow best practices in its setup (privacy), but it was designed without setting any criteria for judging its success or failure in helping to flatten the curve, and without embedding it in an appropriate regulatory framework to ensure that apps like covid alert aren’t misused by businesses. and the government is spending $10 million to advertise it .
meanwhile, the world health organization reports that “ the effectiveness of digital proximity tracking to assist contact tracing remains unknown ,” with many variables affecting its potential utility, none of which have been publicly accounted for by the government.
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instead, covid alert’s presentation and reception benefited from what tech critic evgeny morozov calls technological solutionism . technological solutionism describes the all too prevalent tendency to assume that technology can solve all our problems.
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as digital technologies become increasingly pervasive and private-sector tech firms attempt to insinuate themselves ever deeper into government policy-making (as apple and google, the progenitors of this app, are trying to do here), it’s essential that governments avoid technological solutionism.
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otherwise, they will end up outsourcing basic policy-making responsibilities to private tech companies, just as was narrowly avoided when sidewalk labs abandoned waterfront toronto’s quayside project in may.
and all of us need to stop thinking about social problems in terms of how tech can help address them. because when all you have is an app, everything looks like data.
