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May 27, 2020
Johns Hopkins Releases Comprehensive Report on Digital Contact Tracing to Aid COVID-19 Response.
Leading global experts contributed to the report, offering clear guidance and recommendations on ethics and governance as digital technologies fight the pandemic.
BALTIMORE, May 26, 2020 — Johns Hopkins University has released a comprehensive report on the use of digital contact tracing technologies (DCTT), including smartphone apps and other tools, to fight COVID-19. The paper would help the government, technology developers, businesses, institutional leaders, and the public make responsible decisions.
‘Digital Contact Tracing for Pandemic Response’ is a report led by the Berman Institute for Bioethics in collaboration with the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, as well as leading experts worldwide. The report highlights the ethical, legal, policy, and governance issues that the world must address as it develops and implements DCTT. The report’s primary conclusions and recommendations advise that privacy should not outweigh public health goals and other values. Big technology companies should not unilaterally set terms when such broad public interests are at stake. And decisions about the technology and its uses are updated continuously as new information becomes available.
As officials in many countries strive to find a balance between respecting civil liberties and controlling the pandemic, the report offers clear, well-supported guidance for leaders as they consider deployment and use of these technologies and the data they collect, store and share.
“As we move forward, we must strike a balance between privacy and values like equity, choice, economic well-being, and solidarity,” said Jeffrey Kahn, Ph.D., MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute for Bioethics. “Too much emphasis on privacy could severely limit the ability to gather the information that is critical for effective and efficient contact tracing to help beat the pandemic. And so the full range of interests and values of the public must drive this conversation, and not just those asserted by tech companies.”
The report makes numerous recommendations, including:
- Technology design should not be static. There is no “one size fits all” approach. The design should be capable of evolving depending upon local conditions, new evidence, and changing preferences and priorities.
- Technology companies alone should not control the terms, conditions, or capabilities of DCTT. Nor should they presume to know what is acceptable to members of the public.
- Design the DCTT to have a base set of features that protect privacy, with layers of additional capabilities that users can choose to activate. A default should be that user location data are not shared. Still, users should be provided with natural mechanisms and prompt to allow for opting-in to this capability, especially if opting-in is critical to achieving public health goals.
- Make the De-identified data collected through DCTT available to public health professionals and researchers to support population-level studies and analyses.
- Those who authorize the use of DCTT within a particular jurisdiction or institution should continuously and systematically monitor the technology’s performance. The monitoring should include monitoring for effectiveness and benefit, monitoring for harms, and monitoring for the fair distribution of both benefits and harms.
- Governments should not require mandatory use of DCTT, given the uncertainty about potential burdens and benefits. New technology, user, and real-world testing are needed.
- Congress should enact legislation specifically tailored to the use of DCTT as part of the response to COVID-19, which would facilitate the use of DCTT to promote the public health response while protecting citizens.
“In this time of COVID-19, digital technologies have an unprecedented capacity to accelerate and improve the way the world responds to infectious disease outbreaks and pandemics,” said Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels. “The digital contact tracing technologies represent a great opportunity. They also present significant ethical, legal, and governance concerns. I’m grateful to the Berman Institute of Bioethics for leading this effort and galvanizing some of the nation’s and the world’s foremost leaders on these issues to share their knowledge on this complex and timely set of issues.”
The report is the result of rapid research and expert consensus effort led by a group of leaders in bioethics, health security, public health, technology, engineering, public policy, and law.
Source: Johns Hopkins University
|GlobalGiants.Com|
Edited & Posted by the Editor | 1:54 PM | Link to this Post
