The Social Contracts We Didn’t Sign: Viewing COVID-19 technologies as deterministic extensions of the state to understand and mitigate issues.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments deployed various technologies that caused controversy. While technical concerns about privacy and data management have been discussed in the literature, we propose that governments have unwittingly faced a deeper issue that we can investigate with theoretical tools from ethics and technology studies. From this perspective, we discuss debates about three types of COVID-19 technologies: track and trace apps, data models and vaccine QR codes. We theoretically suggest that privacy concerns are tensions manifested from deeper discomfort with the idea that the state signs social contracts on citizen’s behalf, which brings an implicit fear of technological determinism. This thought experiment can help us better understand people’s fears. In response, governments can find ways to encourage constructive iteration whereby citizens are able to negotiate these new …