Data collection and processing via digital public health technologies are being promoted worldwide by governments and private companies as strategic remedies for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic and loosening lockdown measures. However, the ethical and legal boundaries of deploying digital tools for disease surveillance and control purposes are unclear, and a rapidly evolving debate has emerged globally around the promises and risks of mobilizing digital tools for public health. To help scientists and policymakers navigate technological and ethical uncertainty, we present a typology of the primary digital public health applications currently in use. Namely: proximity and contact tracing, symptom monitoring, quarantine control, and flow modeling. For each, we discuss context-specific risks, cross-sectional issues, and ethical concerns. Finally, in recognition of the need for practical guidance, we propose a navigation aid for policymakers made up of ten steps for the ethical use of digital public health tools.
We conducted a systematic literature review on the ethical considerations of the use of contact tracing app technology, which was extensively implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid and extensive use of this technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, while benefiting the public well-being by providing information about people's mobility and movements to control the spread of the virus, raised several ethical concerns for the post-COVID-19 era. To investigate these concerns for the post-pandemic situation and provide direction for future events, we analyzed the current ethical framewo…
To manage citizen evaluations of government performance, public officials use blame avoidance strategies when communicating performance information. We examine two prominent presentational strategies: scapegoating and spinning, while testing how public responses vary depending on whether they are ideologically aligned with the public official. We examine these relationships in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Trump administration sought to shift blame by scapegoating outgroups (by using the term "Chinese virus"), and framing performance information on COVID-19 testing in positiv…
Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, there has been increased interest in the use of digital contact tracing as a means of stopping chains of viral transmission, provoking alarm from privacy advocates. Concerning the ethics of this technology, recent studies have predominantly focused on (1) the formation of guidelines for ethical contact tracing, (2) the analysis of specific implementations, or (3) the review of a select number of contact tracing applications and their relevant privacy or ethical implications. In this study, we provide a comprehensive survey of the evolving …
The onset of COVID-19 has led to the introduction of far-reaching digital interventions in the interest of public health. Among these, digital contact tracing has been proposed as a viable means of targeted control in countries across the globe, including on the African continent. This, in turn, creates significant ethical challenges for vulnerable communities, including LGBTQIA+ persons. In this research paper, we explore some of the ethical implications of digital contact tracing for the LGBTQIA+ community. We refer specifically to the digital infringement of freedoms, and ground our discuss…
Framing Analysis of Health-Related Narratives: Conspiracy versus Mainstream Media
Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学交互系统与数据科学研究所）；Department of Sociology, University of Graz（格拉茨大学社会学系）
How Do Language Models Process Ethical Instructions? Deliberation, Consistency, and Other-Recognition Across Four Models
Research Institute of Criminal Psychiatry / Sex Offender Medical Center（刑事精神病学研究所/性犯罪者医疗中心）；Department of Neuropsychiatry, Kyoto University（京都大学神经精神医学系）
Balancing social utility and equity in distributing limited vaccines represents a critical policy concern for protecting against the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. What is the nature of the trade-off between maximizing collective welfare and minimizing disparities between more and less privileged communities? To evaluate vaccination strategies, we propose a novel epidemic model that explicitly accounts for both demographic and mobility differences among communities and their association with heterogeneous COVID-19 risks, then calibrate it with large-scale data. Using this model, we find that soc…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a severe global pandemic that has claimed millions of lives and continues to overwhelm public health systems in many countries. The spread of COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the human mobility patterns such as daily transportation-related behavior of the public. There is a requirement to understand the disease spread patterns and its routes among neighboring individuals for the timely implementation of corrective measures at the required placement. To increase the effectiveness of contact tracing, countries across the globe are leveraging ad…
Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception. We compare key epidemiological indicators of the progression of the pandemic with indicators of the public perception of the pandemic constructed from ~20 million unique Covid-19-related tweets from 12 countr…
Through lockdowns and other severe changes to daily life, almost everyone is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists and medical doctors are - among others - mainly interested in researching, monitoring, and improving physical and mental health of the general population. Mobile health apps (mHealth), and apps conducting ecological momentary assessments (EMA) respectively, can help in this context. However, developing such mobile applications poses many challenges like costly software development efforts, strict privacy rules, compliance with ethical guidelines, local laws, and regulation…
The adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) technology during the COVID-19pandemic has shown multiple benefits, including helping to slow the spread of infectious disease and to improve the dissemination of accurate information. However, to support both ethical technology deployment and user adoption, privacy must be at the forefront. With the loss of privacy being a critical threat, thorough threat modeling will help us to strategize and protect privacy as digital contact tracing technologies advance. Various threat modeling frameworks exist today, such as LINDDUN, STRIDE, PASTA, and NIST, …
Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy (Sharma & Bashir 2020, Tang 2020). This emphasis reveals significant challenges to ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis (Floridi & Strait 2020), preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology. Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the relationship bet…
COVID-19 has radically changed society as we know it. To reduce the spread of the virus, millions across the globe have been forced to work remotely, often in make-shift home offices, and using a plethora of new, unfamiliar digital technologies. In this article, we critically analyse cyber security and privacy concerns arising due to remote working during the coronavirus pandemic. Through our work, we discover a series of security risks emerging because of the realities of this period. For instance, lack of remote-working security training, heightened stress and anxiety, rushed technology depl…
University of Turin（都灵大学）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）
Since their announcement in November 2020, COVID-19 vaccines were largely debated by the press and social media. With most studies focusing on COVID-19 disinformation in social media, little attention has been paid to how mainstream news outlets framed COVID-19 narratives compared to alternative sources. To fill this gap, we use cognitive network science and natural language processing to reconstruct time-evolving semantic and emotional frames of 5745 Italian news, that were massively re-shared on Facebook and Twitter, about COVID-19 vaccines. We found consistently high levels of trust/anticip…
When Ethics and Payoffs Diverge: LLM Agents in Morally Charged Social Dilemmas
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen（图宾根人工智能研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；University College Cork（科克大学）
Online social media provides a channel for monitoring people's social behaviors and their mental distress. Due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 people are increasingly using online social networks to express their feelings. Consequently, there is a significant amount of diverse user-generated social media content. However, COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, study, socialize and recreate and this has affected our well-being and mental health problems. There are growing researches that leverage online social media analysis to detect and assess user's mental status. In this pap…
Innovations in data science and AI/ML have a central role to play in supporting global efforts to combat COVID-19. The versatility of AI/ML technologies enables scientists and technologists to address an impressively broad range of biomedical, epidemiological, and socioeconomic challenges. This wide-reaching scientific capacity, however, also raises a diverse array of ethical challenges. The need for researchers to act quickly and globally in tackling SARS-CoV-2 demands unprecedented practices of open research and responsible data sharing at a time when innovation ecosystems are hobbled by pro…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Mila（米拉研究所）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Borden Ladner Gervais LLP（博登·拉德纳·热尔韦律师事务所）；The Decision Lab（决策实验室）；Max Planck Institute（马克斯·普朗克研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile apps has the potential to shift the paradigm. Some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems, but more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same ben…
This paper identifies the current challenges of the mechanisation, digitisation and automation of public sector systems and processes, and proposes a modern and practical framework to ensure and assure ethical and high veracity Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems in public institutions. This framework is designed for the specific context of the public sector, in the jurisdictional and constitutional context of Australia, but is extendable to other jurisdictions and private sectors. The goals of the framework are to: 1) earn public trust and grow public confi…
