The Smartphone Pandemic: Mobile technologies and data in the COVID-19 response (SMARTPREP)

Will people let public health authorities track their movements through mobile phone data as they seek to establish the effectiveness of Covid-19 countermeasures like physical distancing, school closures and travel restrictions? Until recently, such questions seemed unfathomable outside of authoritarian regimes. However, the COVID-19 pandemic response has seen the rapid introduction of digital innovations like smartphone apps and mobile data in countries' efforts to manage the crisis. New partnerships between governments and tech companies and new legal injunctions passed without public oversight have created a 'data governance crisis of international concern' that seems set to fundamentally alter the way we think about privacy in relation to the public good. The SMARTPREP project provides the first investigation of the political, social and ethical implications of new uses of digital innovations in the COVID-19 response. It will analyse global data governance norms and provide case studies of Norway and Sierra Leone. Norway is currently at the forefront of experimenting with digital innovations as part of its effort to stem its outbreak, while Sierra Leone is drawing on experience of using smartphone tech during the Ebola crisis in 2014-2015 to prepare for a likely outbreak there. The project will explore how political and cultural differences affect public responses to digital innovation in times of crisis, while established relationships between the two countries around health information and development aid will make it possible to study instances of policy and technology transfer. The project will provide policy-relevant knowledge about how digital innovations affect the way societies think of, prepare for, and respond to pandemic risk, and novel insights into how the use of digital innovations to fight the pandemic can challenge core societal values such as democracy, privacy and trust, with potential implications for the effectiveness of countermeasures.