=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2737/long paper04
|storemode=property
|title=COVID-19: Crisis Management and Promethean Thinking in Digital Age
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2737
|authors=Heimo, Olli I.,Heimo, Jenni,Hakkala, Antti
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/tethics/HeimoHH20
}}
==COVID-19: Crisis Management and Promethean Thinking in Digital Age==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_4.pdf
Proceedings of the Conference on Technology Ethics 2020 - Tethics 2020
COVID-19: Crisis Management
and Promethean Thinking in Digital Age
Long paper
Heimo, Olli I.1,3[0000-0001-9412-0393], Heimo, Jenni2[0000-0002-5781-1264]
and Hakkala, Antti3[0000-0002-0932-7814]
1 Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Turku School of Economics,
University of Turku, Finland
olli.heimo@utu.fi
2 Department of Social Research, University of Turku, Finland
3 Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland
Abstract. In this paper we discuss the current COVID-19 crisis, digital rights,
trust as part of the society and thinking ahead with the future crisis. As the
pandemic has given us various examples around the world on what options we
have in battling with this deadly disease and will eventually give us large amount
of data on what of the various different methods seemed effective. Yet we should
also focus on what is the ethical way for promoting individual rights and social
cohesion before the next eventual crisis hits the globe.
Keywords: COVID-19, Coronavirus, Digitalization, Ethics, Information
technology, Information security
1 Introduction
During the current COVID-19 pandemic the governments around the world have faced
immense challenges in keeping their citizens safe, guaranteeing the functioning of the
medical system, and keeping the economy somewhat running. In the midst of this, some
erosion of basic human rights, e.g. with the freedom of movement, ownership,
entrepreneurship, and work (Jones, 2020; El Nacional, 2020; Lowen, 2020; BBC,
2020a) has happened due to the technological development as development of
technology often is in odds with current standing of human rights, e.g. privacy. As
humankind has adapted to the new situation, also digital rights, human rights in
cyberspace, such as freedom of expression, right to privacy, and right to information
security have been under the radar (see e.g. Cyranoski, D., 2020; Copeland, R., 2020;
Telia Company, 2020; Lyons, K., 2020; Bloomberg, 2020). For those of us living in
western democracies the situation is rather new as we have been enjoying our privileged
lives where there has been at least a consensus to aim towards the actualisation of these
rights.
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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However, there has been significant pressure around the world to diminish these
rights due to the increased security and safety (Brooks, Webster, Smith, et. al, 2020;
CDC, 2020), to ‘flatten the curve’ (Roberts, 2020; Stevens, 2020) or stop the spreading
of virus altogether (Walker, Whittaker, Watson, et. al, 2020; Dewan, 2020). The former
stands for slowing the spread of the virus by means of social distancing and taking care
of hygiene in order to keep the medical system from being overloaded. The latter refers
to use similar yet stronger and prolonged methods of isolating people from each other
to prevent people from infecting others (ECDC, 2020a; ECDC, 2020b; ECDC, 2020c).
Both of these goals require sacrifices from society and individuals alike due to
diminished productivity of goods and services. Diminished productivity leads to
diminished income and tax revenues, thus endangering the economic system and many
services, which are meaningful, important, or even essential for an individual well-
being (see e.g. Holt & Burns, 2020; BBC, 2020b; BBC, 2020c). Hence the constant
debate (where the debate is allowed) on the effectiveness of actions against the outbreak
(see e.g. Anderson, Heesterbeek & Klinkenberg, 2020; BBC, 2020d; Cyranoski, D.,
2020). That is, while good examples can be found that restrictions on free movement
and working are in fact effective against the spread of the virus, the consequences of
these restrictions are harmful as well.
Moreover, as the individual benefit and society’s benefit can easily be in opposition
with each other, there has been debate on how to enforce the restrictions. As the crisis
has hit different individuals differently, for example those able to work from home have
merely changed their working routines as many of those working in restaurants and
bars have been sacked or furloughed, the restrictions made by the government can
easily be seen as ‘unfair’, even ‘unjust’ (News Wires, 2020; BBC, 2020e; St. Denis,
2020). Whereas some countries, e.g. Finland, being a Nordic well-fare state, has a
system for guaranteeing basic level of income for the unemployed, not all countries
share the ideology (STM, 2014; STM, 2020a; STM, 2020b; STM, 2020c; STM, 2020d).
E.g. in U.S. the unemployment and the crisis and fixes around it have caused quite a
stir, to put it mildly, amongst those fighting to feed their families (see e.g. Gearan &
Wagner, 2020; BBC, 2020f; BBC, 2020g; Fung, 2020; Lewis, 2020). Therefore the
motivations for many in this situation to break the rules and guidelines seems justified
enough while the society as a whole wishes of course to everyone follow its rules which
are – in the best case at least – made to protect and benefit the society and the individuals
living in it.
Digitalisation has given us tools to monitor each other in the ways unimaginable
before. As nearly everyone nowadays carries at least one mobile device with them, they
leave a digital trace of their movements. Moreover, the social media gives us
possibilities to monitor and guide the discussions and alter the public opinion. Facial
recognition software (BBC, 2020h; Brewster, 2020; Reevel, P., 2020), the use of data
mining (Lewis, Conn & Pegg, 2020; Chapman, 2020) and AI (Wakefield, 2020; Shead,
2020) thus using personal and private data, and tracing monetary traffic, to mention a
few techniques, combined with the governments’ monopoly for violence, gives those
in power a good tool to control the individual and masses alike. Usually these powers
are kept in check with some sort of constitutional legislation (see e.g. Pol., V, 1301a17-
1301b35; Tushnet, Fleiner-Gerster, & Saunders, 2013) but due to the nature of the
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crisis, many countries have declared a state of emergency thus granting the government
more power than the constitution allows in normal times (see e.g. FEMA, 2020; Finnish
Government, 2020; Government of South Australia, 2020; Aljazeera, 2020;
Legislation.gov.uk, 2020; Scaglioni & Fiore, 2020).
In this paper we examine and discuss these digital restrictions, limitations, and
violations of human rights, both introduced and suggested, from a social philosophy
and IT-ethics perspective (see e.g. Heimo, 2018, pp. 1–5).
To emphasise, this paper is not meant to be a critique towards any government or
organizations, nor their handling of the corona crisis 2020, but merely be a thought-
provoking publication to serve as a guideline to improve the handling and reception of
the crises to come. The authors do not claim a proficiency in epidemiology nor do they
claim to have proven solutions on how to handle to crises at hand. The aim of the paper
however is to urge the governments, organisations, and citizens around the world to
take actions to a more promethean viewpoint do to the fact that it is obvious this is not
the last crises we will have to face, in local nor in global level.
2 Digital methods in countering the COVID-19 crisis
Tracking applications installed on smartphones for tracing exposure and infected
people has been one approach that sparked significant discussion on privacy of users.
There are multiple approaches so far on how to implement such an application.
Proximity of two devices can be measured using location information provided by GPS
or Bluetooth tokens that are automatically exchanged in proximity between devices.
GPS has issues with working indoors, however, and Bluetooth exposes devices to
various attacks and also makes it possible to track individual devices, should someone
wish to do so. Mobile operator data on devices in the same cell area can be used as
well, but it is not accurate enough for purposes of close contact tracing for COVID-19
transmission, as its accuracy varies between hundreds of meters to kilometers (Mateos
& Fisher, 2006). Nevertheless, it can be used to identify people that have been in certain
geographic areas of interest or those who have travelled from elsewhere to the area.
Next, we will briefly discuss some initiatives around the world for contact tracing using
smartphones.
The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) initiative
(Portvier, 2020) aims to provide a framework for tracing proximity contacts with
smartphones while simultaneously complying with the strict data privacy regulations
of the EU. The initiative currently considers both centralized and decentralized
approaches for storing contact information between devices. Contact tracing is done
over Bluetooth and proximity information is encrypted on the device itself. In case of
potential exposure, users are requested but not required to share their contact history
with relevant authorities. MIT is working on Private Automated Contact Tracing
(PACT) (PACT, 2020) that aims to trace contacts with Bluetooth token exchange.
PACT promises to keep private information hidden from authorities, healthcare
providers, mobile operators and other users.
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In Singapore, “TraceTogether” (Government of Singapore, 2020) is the official
application for contact tracking. It uses Bluetooth connections between smartphones to
exchange tokens, signifying that two devices have been in close contact. The tokens are
stored centrally on government servers. It has been criticized for being vulnerable to
attacks from other users, the government and malicious third parties. (Asghar, H.,
Farokhi, F., Kaafar, D. et. al, 2020.)
In Finland, a mobile application for contact tracing is under development by private
companies, but with the full sanction of and official funding from government.
(Manner, M., Nieminen, T. & Teittinen, P., 2020; Uusitalo, K., 2020.) Finland also has
an online symptom radar (Helsingin Sanomat & Futurice, 2020.), which is a service
where people can describe their symptoms using a questionnaire and then the service
visualize how people are reporting various symptoms around the country.
Iceland has their own application, Rakning C-19 (The Directorate of Health and The
Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management of Iceland, 2020). It stores
contact information locally on the device and can only transmit any information after
user approval for assistance from the national COVID tracking team. If the user
approves data sharing, all contacts are shared for 14 days with the tracing team.
China has several different applications for tracing potential contacts. (AFP-JIJI,
2020.) Some rely on GPS location tracking while others use a host of other collectible
information, for example passing checkpoints, being tested for the virus, using public
transportation, and so on.
These examples paint a picture on different approaches globally to help tracing
potential contagions. Some countries use centralized systems or approaches that would
not perhaps be acceptable in other countries, while others take the privacy of citizens
more seriously. Whatever methods are used depend on the society, its (legal) norms and
what is considered as appropriate intrusion to people’s privacy. A discussion about
these actions and suitable methods to save human lives should be conducted.
3 Trust, forced trust and society
There are several options for countering pandemics. Some of these, e.g. promoting good
hand hygienic seems rather non-threatening to human rights whereas demanding exact
location information about every citizen seems rather harsh activity. Yet there might be
situations where the movement of people is mandatory for the survival of the population
and therefore there must be some discussion to be had – but when this is truly the case?
In optimal situation citizens trust their decision-makers to do what is best for the
people. The people love prediction, routines and that they can trust each other to honour
the deals. Trust to continuity and predictability brings meaning and construct to the life
replacing constant threat evaluation and mitigation (Cetnerowski, 2012; Harisalo &
Miettinen, 2010, p. 24; Törrönen, 2015; Ward, Mamerow, and Meyer, 2014). During
the crisis however the situation becomes unpredictable and a therefore strange
phenomenon, for example toilet paper hoarding, happens.
Societies are based on trust because they are complex and layered social networks.
First individuals trust each other and when they have enough trustworthy people around
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them, they will trust even the individuals they do not know. That is how democratic
society is worked from bottom to top and also that is the reason society works. Trust is
something which is earned. Society cannot and will not run if individuals do not trust
each other to play with same rulebook. It will stop working if too many individuals do
how they please whether it is legal or recommended or not. The overall trust between
people, as well as trust between the government and the people can increase and
decrease, and we all can affect to which one it is by giving example. (Cetnerowski,
2012; Harisalo & Miettinen, 2010, pp. 24–25, 41, 44, 119, 174–175; Törrönen, 2015;
Ward, Mamerow, and Meyer, 2014)
As trust starts to wear out and uncertainty, unpredictability, and uncontrollability
begin to increase, life is no longer in the hands of people to the same extent as before.
People can no longer trust others to speak the truth, take care of their responsibilities,
and take responsibility for the things entrusted to them. Problem begin to arise in
institutional arrangements, and social grievances, unpredictability of behaviour, and
indifference to the life and property of fellow human beings increase. The actions of
political decision-makers and authorities become suspect. However people love to trust.
They accept the decisions even when they dislike them if they feel decisions are made
justice. (Harisalo & Miettinen, 2010, pp. 24-25.)
The trust can also be made visible by the oppressive and intrusive actions of the
government, e.g. certain types of surveillance. If the mistrust is shown and the citizens
do not trust the governments’ rationale for the surveillance, the citizens may start acting
to prevent the said surveillance by e.g. leaving their cell phones to home when leaving
the house. This, while may seem a good and refreshing act against the omnipresent and
pervasive digitalization can and will have by-products, e.g. of people not being able to
call help when they need it. And yet, people are still able to choose to leave their mobile
devices home if they want to, so it should not be the government’s task to promote any
involuntary tracing of people, at least not with ramifications. Moreover, if it is a
possibility to avoid governmental consequences, e.g. be charged with a felony, by
leaving one’s mobile phone to home, will it become mandatory? Not likely. Still, it is
good to remember that a person is not their cell phone and yet the tracking of the mobile
devices seem to be a good idea for some.
Samuel Bentham, the brother of famous Jeremy Bentham, introduced the idea of the
Panopticon in late 18th century. (Bentham, 1843.) The idea of the panopticon was to
build a prison where the inmates could always be unobtrusively followed from a central
tower. The inmates would not be aware when, if at all, the guards were monitoring their
activities and thus while they had to assume that they were always monitored thus
altering their way of behaviour. Foucault (Foucault, 1975) modified the concept to
include the whole society where the subjects of the panopticon are not criminals but
citizens. If this kind of systems would be implemented, they would not only have a
profound effect to alter the behaviour of the citizens’, but moreover to break the trust
between the citizens and the government and replace it with control.
The panopticon has been used to describe various surveillance scenarios, for
example mass Internet surveillance (Hakkala, 2017). One aspect of Internet
surveillance is that you do not know whether you are the target of surveillance or not,
as it usually happens on metadata level, gathered from various Internet service
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providers’ networks via lawful interception. You can assume that all your actions are
monitored, even when it is not the case. Additionally, metadata is not very anonymous.
Mere location data is very identifying (Song, Qu, Blumm, & Barabási, 2010) and just
by observing telephone and message metadata it is possible to make very accurate
assessments on the contents of communications (Mayer, Mutchler, & Mitchell, 2016).
One aspect of surveillance is that it has a tendency to expand when new tools and
techniques are taken into use, perhaps for another purpose originally, but if sufficient
surveillance potential is identified, it may be very difficult to decommission temporarily
set up systems after their original use window has passed.
Forced trust (Hakkala, Heimo, Hyrynsalmi, & Kimppa, 2018) (see also Heimo,
2018, pp. 43–46) describes a situation where users of an information system, device or
service have practically no options but to use a system that has been given to them from
above, either from government or employer, regardless of any security, privacy or other
concerns they may have. Additionally, by not using the system or service the users are
significantly at a disadvantage compared to others who use the provided systems.
The asymmetry between government and citizens is highlighted in the tracking
applications for COVID-19 taken into use all around the world. While many
applications take privacy seriously and at least attempt to protect personally sensitive
data, in some societies there are no options. In China, a contact tracking application
will give you a green/yellow/red code based on your location, contact and activity
history. Depending on the colour, you may or may not use public transport, travel
outside your hometown, or whatever restrictions the authorities have enforced at the
time. It can be argued that this is a practical method for managing a pandemic, but the
options for those who do not trust the authorities are very few. One factor that seems to
come up often is that the Chinese have a different attitude and outlook regarding
surveillance and government involvement in their lives – and this may be well and true.
The adoption of tracking technologies such as those discussed in this paper can be
justified in the case of a global pandemic that threatens the lives of millions of people.
The real problems manifest only when the pandemic is over and societies return to
normal pre-pandemic life. All the systems and tracking capabilities that have been built
during times of crisis are still there, and the temptation to continue using them for other
purposes may be too strong to resist.
The government can also act with private sector to violate the digital rights of the
people. For example at least Facebook (Mosseri, A., 2017), Google (Dash, S., 2020)
and Twitter (BBC, 2020i; Helm, Graham-Harrison & McKie, 2020) have taken action
to remove “fake news” around the corona virus. However, as some of these social media
postings have been made by top politicians of their respective countries, e.g. the
president of Brazil (Wong, 2020) or the officials of U.S., there can be some pondering
around is this censorship political. As Heimo & Kimppa (2020) argue, the censorship
by the private companies is still censorship while it is done in a public forum. 1
1
As this paper was about to be submitted, Twitter and POTUS got into a heated
argument with each other as the former had included a fact-checking message to a post
made by latter. As the information is still quite new and rather unclear, the occasion is
not included in this paper.
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4 Freedom of speech and coercion
Yet, the ‘official knowledge’ has been changing during the crisis thus making the
censorship even more alerting. As it seems to be the current understanding, the
pandemic could have been a lot less severe, if a late Chinese ophthalmologist, M.D. Li
Wenliang had not be censored (see e.g. Helm, Graham-Harrison & McKie, 2020; Kuo,
2020). The understanding of the virus and the disease has been evolving – as is proper
in science – and therefore the governmental guidelines in different countries have been
altered to best match the current situation and knowledge. However, if the current
governmental knowledge is also being kept as a truth against which the information
possibly being censored is being compared, there is a problem – a problem which leads
to this pandemic in the first place!
It is altogether understandable that there is a requirement for giving ‘proper’
information and there is a lot of harm coming to happen if we let ourselves be led with
false information. Yet again the fact-checking should concentrate on verifiable facts
and not be opinion journalism which it has been criticized about (see e.g. Riddell, 2020;
Robertson, 2020). Moreover, the limitation of social media to be a tool to allow only
‘government produced truth’ can be seen more threatening. In the handling of the crisis
it is important to understand that the government – as in M.D. Li Wenliang’s case shows
and various governmental statements and the statements by WHO confirm – can be
wrong from time to time (STT-AFP, 2020; Frei, 2020). Or as this statement from WHO
representative illustrates:
[...] but outside China currently we have around 440 cases and
so we cannot say it's a pandemic even if we have those few
clusters of cases in each of its these countries the contact are
traceable. We know the chain of transmission and the authorities
are reporting regularly the cases, but things are under control
and [...]
– Dr. Briand, Director of Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases at the World Health
Organisation in television interview 12th of February 2020. (Frei, 2020.)
It is understandable that the task of Dr. Briand had to handle, even without the global
political connotations, was, if not impossible, at least extremely hard, and they had to
work with the knowledge at hand. Please notice that the idea of this paper is not meant
to criticize the work of WHO, but to show that even with their vast knowledge,
connections, and wisdom they can be wrong. Hence, to enforce censorship based on
their statements, or statements of any other, can lead a truth to be censored. As
happened with Dr. Li’s case in China. Therefore, when we ask for fact-checking, we
must ask first: who is giving the facts and who is evaluating them? And is it proper to
censor differing opinions, and if, when and why? Should we print warning labels on
top of 90 % of claims in the social media “this cannot be verified”, just to be sure?
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Don’t we trust anymore that people are capable to media literacy and critical attitude
when using the social media?
The same also applies to all other digital surveillance. Should we erode privacy away
just to be sure? Not likely. The problem with coercion in societal level is described in
Harisalo & Miettinen’s 2010 book:
“The road to coercion is often insidiously paved with the
concentration of political power, national programs, and the
restriction of political competition. Every democratic system is
also prone to these practices. With the exception of large-scale
disasters and wars, coercion does not serve the changing needs
of the people as well as is commonly assumed. Coercion usually
creates countermeasures aimed at correcting the imbalance of
power and demanding compensation for unwanted experiences
where necessary. These situations are usually difficult to deal
with and often lead to an uncontrollable outcome. They have a
long impact in the community. Recourse to coercion should be
avoided for as long as possible, as its consequences are often
unforeseen.2” (Harisalo & Miettinen, 2010, s. 175.)
5 Conclusions
Therefore, it seems that there are a multitude of methods to be used in the digital
world to counter the crisis such as COVID-19 pandemic. However, as with their
physical world subsidies – if we wish to think dually with these intertwined entities –
they share a number of problems with basic human rights. Different governments
around the world have tried or planned a number of these methods with varying success
rates and varying levels of rights’ violations, but the discussion should slowly be turned
to the future: what shall we do next time?
As the pandemic can turn to worse, or a new pandemic or different kind of crisis
might be around the next corner, we should be ready not only with medical-, meal-, and
military-wise but also be vigilant to understand the vast possibilities and the deep
pitfalls the technology brings us. Whereas tracing human behaviour in abstract level to
improve understanding of the spreading of the disease can be helpful and does not
2
Translation, original in Finnish: ”Tie kohti pakkovaltaa on usein salakavalasti
päällystetty poliittisen vallan keskityksellä, kansallisilla ohjelmilla ja poliittisen
kilpailun rajoittamisella. Jokainen demokraattinen järjestelmä on myös altis näille
käytännöille. Suuren mittaluokan katastrofeja ja sotia lukuun ottamatta pakko ei palvele
ihmisten muuttuvia tarpeita niin hyvin kuin on tapana yleisesti olettaa. Pakko synnyttää
yleensä vastavoimia, joiden tavoitteena on korjata vallan epätasapainoa ja vaatia
tarvittaessa hyvitystä ei-toivotuista kokemuksista. Nämä tilanteet ovat yleensä vaikeita
käsitellä ja johtavat usein hallitsemattomaan lopputulokseen. Ne vaikuttavat pitkään
yhteisössä. Pakkoon turvautumista olisi hyvä välttää mahdollisimman pitkään, koska
sen seuraukset ovat usein ennakoimattomia.”
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endanger the privacy of an individual if anonymised correctly, tracing individual cell-
phone locations and possibly prosecute them with “social distancing violations” is
somewhat harsher tools for the government to have. A voluntary mobile software is not
a violation of rights but a mandatory one is – especially due to the pervasiveness of
these programs if they are granted an absolute control over the phone, but also due the
fact that the government should not mandate what programs should be run in people’s
computers in the first place.
Yet there might be situations where even that could be essential, but the justifications
of these kinds of methods should be thought before the crisis, not during it. Everything
is easier to justify when acting with limited knowledge and people’s lives are in danger
and therefore it is easy to over-react and give the government more power than it needs.
Therefore, we need a set of definite set of rules over crisis situations which dictate
when and with what reasons the government can limit the rights of the people both with
clarifying the existing legislation and writing new, clear and in-detail legislation, to
serve in the times of need, especially but not limited to digital rights. Sort of ‘crisis
constitution’ as the society must be kept as predictable as possible even during the crisis
– and thinking ahead, generating guidelines, rules etc. which are publicly available
generates that trust. To emphasize, if censorship or fact-correction of ever-changing
facts or political opinions is ever needed in the cases like this, we should be aware of
the triggers mandating them, prior the crises. Most of all, the guidelines should include
clear instructions on when these powers over people’s digital rights end and how to be
sure that the surveillance society does not become “a new normal”.
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