From Computational Indicators To Law Into Technologies: The Internet Of Things, Data Analytics And Encoding In Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

This paper investigates the data life-cycle of contact-tracing apps (CTAs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the socio-legal implications resulting from the design and technology choices that software developers inevitably make. These choices are often neglected by policy-makers due to the inherent technical complexity of algorithmic decision systems and to certain naive belief in technological solutionism. In particular, this paper shows, first, that technology-harvested data do not reflect an objective representation of reality, and therefore require a context within which to be understood and interpreted for policy and legal purposes; and, second, that the use of data analytics to extract insights from these data enables the production of computational indicators. By looking at how CTAs are used to implement pandemic-mitigation restrictions such as lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing and testing, the paper ultimately brings forth the ways in which technologies - and thus their bias and ways of framing social reality - become embedded in the law.