Miss Vittoria Porta1
1Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, , United Kingdom
Biography:
Vittoria joined the Ethox Centre as a recognised student in 2022 and later as a DPhil candidate in population health in October 2023.
Her research focuses on the ethical considerations of the re-purposing of AI tools for infectious disease surveillance in policing, supervised by Professor Michael Parker, Dr. Stephanie Johnson, and Prof. Federica Lucivero. Her research project is funded by the Nuffield Department of Population Health.
Before commencing her DPhil studies, Vittoria earned her MS in International Relations from the University of Milan in 2022. Prior to this, she earned her BA in Political Sciences and International Relations from Pavia University in 2019.
Abstract:
Surveillance and prevention of new infectious disease outbreaks is a matter of global relevance that requires public health interventions. Governments and Big-Tech companies, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic developed new technologies and AI tools to fight the spread of the virus. In particular, technologies such as mobile phone tracking (digital contract tracing apps) to identify possible infection routes and facial recognition technologies (e.g., dome-shaped surveillance cameras, thermal scanners, and drones) have expanded their use recently playing a key role in public health surveillance and reducing contagions.
Even though scholars have explored the ethical implications of using technologies for disease surveillance resolving (not completely) the associated challenges, there remains a critical gap in addressing the ethical issues arising from repurposing technologies for COVID-19 surveillance for policing and social control practices. In this context, recent experiences attest that surveillance tools have been used to monitor compliance with quarantine orders, enforce social distancing measures, and identify individuals violating lockdown restrictions.
The paper presents a literature review and a desk review of grey literature with the primary objective of mapping the technologies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutinizing the ethical concerns and assessing their potential (and effective) repurpose in policing. Simultaneously, it explores the intersection of policing, health data, and technology, and aims to clarify the boundaries in the re-use of technologies developed for COVID-19 surveillance and the associated health-related data, in terms of ethical legitimacy and social desirability for purposes of social control.