Applying contextual integrity to digital contact tracing and automated triage for hospitals during COVID-19.

To control and minimize the spread of COVID-19, various technological solutions have been offered. In this research we focus on digital contact tracing and automated triage for hospitals. We conducted an online survey in Flanders, Belgium (N=1708) to investigate the perceived appropriateness of these systems based on the Contextual Integrity framework, as developed by Nissenbaum (2004). The results for digital contact tracing show significant differences between the appropriateness of using different types of data, with sensitive individual data considered much less appropriate than population data, and between different goals, with goals with a high individual impact considered les appropriate than goals with a low individual impact or societal impact. In addition, the data further shows how the respondents find the usage of digital contact tracing to be less appropriate after the pandemic, underlining the temporality of this technological solution. For automated triage, the results indicate how the usage of gender to determine the priority of patients’ treatments is perceived significantly less appropriate than the other variables, including age. Overall, this study moves beyond a focus on privacy in terms of ‘control’ or ‘secrecy’ and amplifies the voices of citizens and their privacy expectations.