Samuel G, Lucivero F
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London, Bush House, Strand, London, UK.
Ethox Centre and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Oxford University, Oxford, UK.
Ethics Inf Technol. 2022;24(1):5. doi: 10.1007/s10676-022-09628-z. Epub 2022 Jan 24.
This paper explores ethical debates associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app that occurred in the public news media and broader public policy, and in doing so, takes ethics debate as an object for sociological study. The research question was: how did UK national newspaper news articles and grey literature frame the ethical issues about the app, and how did stakeholders associated with the development and/or governance of the app reflect on this? We examined the predominance of different ethical issues in news articles and grey literature, and triangulated this using stakeholder interview data. Findings illustrate how news articles exceptionalised ethical debate around the app compared to the way they portrayed ethical issues relating to 'manual' contact tracing. They also narrowed the debate around specific privacy concerns. This was reflected in the grey literature, and interviewees perceived this to have emerged from a 'privacy lobby'. We discuss the findings, and argue that this limited public ethics narrative masked broader ethical issues.
本文探讨了英国新冠病毒接触者追踪应用程序在公共新闻媒体和更广泛的公共政策中引发的伦理辩论，并将伦理辩论作为社会学研究的对象。研究问题是：英国全国性报纸的新闻报道和灰色文献如何构建有关该应用程序的伦理问题，以及与该应用程序的开发和/或治理相关的利益相关者对此有何看法？我们研究了新闻报道和灰色文献中不同伦理问题的主导情况，并通过利益相关者访谈数据进行三角验证。研究结果表明，与报道“人工”接触者追踪的伦理问题的方式相比，新闻报道如何将围绕该应用程序的伦理辩论特殊化。它们还缩小了围绕特定隐私问题的辩论范围。这在灰色文献中有所体现，受访者认为这是由“隐私游说团体”造成的。我们讨论了研究结果，并认为这种有限的公共伦理叙述掩盖了更广泛的伦理问题。
