Talk:COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

Length:

By my count, you had 3021 words which means you met the required word count. I think something that helped you do so was the fact that you broke every main section of your page down into multiple subsections so you had plenty of content. Great job!

Structure:

Your article does include the three major components of a good article: an opening paragraph, a body in one or more sections, statements backed up by reliable sources. In your first paragraph, you do a good job laying a foundation by explaining the purpose of COVID-19 contact tracing applications. Furthermore, your brief introductory explanation about how the global accessibility of smartphones was an affordance that allows COVID-19 contact tracing apps to collect users’ data leads well into your introduction of the ethical concerns associated with such applications. You also effectively set up readers for the rest of the article by introducing these ethical concerns in the first paragraph. Introducing these ethical concerns at the beginning of the article means that the reader will have these in the back of their minds while reading the rest of the paper and may be able to identify ethical problems in the examples and case studies you write about in the body of the article.

My only recommendation structure-wise would be to consider rearranging how you have divided the paper. With many short sections in a row, the first draft is a little choppy. It might be beneficial to consolidate some of the shorter sections into one bigger section.

Clarity:

I thought clarity was a strong point of your article. Particularly when you describe the ethical concerns surrounding COVID-19 contact tracing apps. The first issue at stake is users’ privacy. One ethical issue of privacy is that for these contact tracing apps to do their job, they must use people’s location data. Furthermore, you point out that this is concerning due to the fact that many of these apps have vague or inaccessible data privacy policies. The next issue at stake is equity. As you point out, not everyone has mobile phones, a requirement for using the contact tracing apps, which means that these apps could disproportionately benefit privileged populations. The final issue at stake that you describe in this article is ethical concerns surrounding the idea of voluntariness. You note that a contact tracing app that does a good job protecting voluntariness lets a user decide in each step of the contact tracing process what information they are willing to share or not. Additionally, you state that part of protecting voluntariness is making sure that a user not only gets to choose but has access to information about the meaning of the actions they decide to make. There is often an issue with online platforms not being transparent about how people’s data will be used. Something I liked about the sections of your article focused on ethics was the Best Practices section. It is one thing to point out the ethical issues of an information technology, but it is one step above and beyond to provide information about how these the people who make contact tracing apps can do their best to not take advantage of its users.

Objective reporting (Neutral point of view):

You did a great job reporting on the previously mentioned ethical issues objectively. You avoid stating personal opinions and support all your claims with references. In this case, the main stakeholders are the users of an app, the creators of an app, and the governing bodies that may or may not be requiring the use of said apps. The discussion of the ethical implications of this technology centers on protecting individual users. I wonder if there is more you could say about the ethics of choosing to use the contact tracing apps. Could/has an argument be made about one’s ethical duty to report COVID info to protect the public health of the common good? Might be an avenue to explore.

Reviewed by Analese Lutz.