From top: Garda checkpoint outside Bray, County Wicklow last week; Rob Kitchin, of the Department of Geography at Maynooth University

Yesterday afternoon.

The Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway, Ireland held its second web panel seminar in its Covid-19 Response series on Facebook.

Focusing on surveillance and social benefit, the panel included Mathieu d’Aquin, Director of Insight and the Data Science Institute at NUI Galway; Heike Felzmann, from the Department of Philosophy at NUI Galway; Rob Kitchin, of the Department of Geography at Maynooth University; Karlin Lillington, of The Irish Times; and Linnet Taylor, from the Department of Law at Tilburg University.

During Mr Kitchin’s contribution he spoke about the HSE’s proposed contact-tracing app – about which very little is known, other than it is reportedly to involve Bluetooth technology, while the HSE has previously said it won’t publish the app’s Data Protection Impact Assessment until the app is launched.

Mr Kitchin’s observations follow The Irish Times reporting yesterday that the HSE awarded Waterford company Nearform the contract to develop the app.

[Mr Kitchin has written a comprehensive blog post on the app, entitled Will CovidTracker Ireland work?]

During yesterday’s seminar, Mr Kitchin said:

“We’re going to give people advice about whether they should self-isolate or whether they need to go and get a test. So there’s going to be some form of decision-making based on these technologies or these technologies are going to be used to enforce that.

“Now there’s clear implications for this because you might be keeping frontline staff off of work unnecessarily, you might be denying other people making a living, or being able to socialise or do whatever right.

“So you’ve got to think about contact-tracing. There’s about 28 countries have already rolled out a contact-tracing app. There’s about 11 more which we know are in progress and they’re particularly, usually, using Bluetooth.

“Now the problem with Bluetooth is there’s a question as to whether it has sufficient resolution, you know, the two-metre thing. So, if I’m going to start getting positive contacts on people who are actually 10 metres away from me or 5 metres away from me?

“And also there’s going to be an issue around timeframe. So in the British app, it’s people being within 2 metres for 15 minutes or more. But, of course, I could have been passing somebody in a supermarket aisle who sneezed, right, and that’s the significant contact which I’m not…

“Also, it doesn’t pick up that I might get it off a surface, so I could pick up the thing off a surface and not off of meeting people.

“Now, there’s issues around the tech. There’s issues around representativeness. So, for example there’s only 28% of people in Ireland who [don’t] have a smartphone.

“There’s issues around data quality, reliability, issues around being able to dupe and spoof the data, issues around rules, sets of parameters, about deciding what decision is given to what people.

“And basically, there’s issues around the tech limitations, that’s going to lead to sizeable gaps and also a very large number of false positives. That’s just going to give a high signal-to-noise ratio.

“But we’re going to make decision based on that data. So there’s an ethics around, basing decisions around these kinds of technologies and these kinds of systems.”

Mr Kitchen added:

“Then there’s the issues around civil liberties and citizenship which seems to be getting a lot of commentary at the minute, particularly around privacy issues. This is a kind of an ethics of what does the tech do? And what are its implications?

“I’m not going to talk about the privacy thing because I think the privacy issue is a little bit of a red herring. There are issues there around privacy and about data security. I think they can be managed.

“I think the bigger thing issue is [inaudible] augmentality and around things like control creep and so on.

“So these are technologies designed to control our behaviour and control our movements. They’re about social and spatial sourcing. They’re about red-lining, and quarantining and so on. They’re about mass population profiling.

“They obviously work to normalise mass surveillance at scale and there’s a worry around notions of control creep. So, we put this technology in place and it starts to become normalised technology that becomes part of our everyday Government mentality going forward.

“So, we know this from 9/11. Technologies, the surveillance system rolled out after 9/11 are still with us. They were not rolled back.

“So anything we implement now could become long-term infrastructure and there’s clearly issues around that.

“And there’s a lot of questions around due process, around oversight, around redress, around rollback and so on.

“And then the last kind of issue I guess is around surveillance capitalism, around the ethics of what does the tech enable.

“So, effectively, what we’ve got here is State-sanctioned surveillance capitalism. We’re leveraging off this large, private infrastructure, mobile phone apps, app development and so on.

“And all of the kinds of civil liberties, kind of issues that we’ve been pushed, trying to push back on, we’re now normalising and embracing because it serves our purpose.

“So we’re basically embedding corporations into the process of governance and we’re sanctioning this type of surveillance capitalism.

“And we’re also obviously creating new market opportunities for these companies and potentially creating gateways into public health data and all kinds of State data.

“And as an element to which, the way in which these companies are engaging or are offering their services, it’s kind of a Covid-washing, if you like, of surveillance capitalism. And there are real questions there.”

Watch back in full above or here

Will CovidTracker Ireland work? (The Programmable City)

Meanwhile…

The Irish Times reports:

The Dutch government has abandoned its initial attempt to commission a Covid-19 contact tracing app after the final seven designs were dismissed as inadequate on privacy grounds.

…Just a week ago, nine IT experts who had been part of the government’s assessment panel for the initial 63 proposed apps signed an open letter saying they were withdrawing because the criteria were unclear, the process was flawed, and user anonymity was not necessarily assured.

Netherlands abandons initial plan to develop Covid-19 tracing app (The Irish Times)

Moore Institute (Facebook)

Previously: The CovidTracker Ireland App And You