On 27 Jan 2021, our centre director, Professor Mark Findlay, and research associate, Alicia Wee, participated in the TiGRE Webinars. They presented on "The Impact of Citizen Exclusion: Understanding Community Disquiet Against Pandemic Surveillance Technology".
Synopsis:
The proliferation of surveillance technology during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a myriad of responses from the public. We posit that public trust and confidence in state control policies employing these technologies is tenuous at best, and the trust-deficit has had a significant impact on the efficacy of the control measures. An examination of varied social responses under different control measures (including an escalated use of surveillance technology during the pandemic) has revealed different sources of disquiet which we have classified under six broad themes: disquiet about the data collected; disquiet concerning authority styles confirming control responses; disquiet regarding the integral architecture of control strategies employed; disquiet surrounding infringement of rights and liberties; disquiet surrounding the role of private sector; as well as uncertainties regarding a post-pandemic world and its “new normal”. Without genuinely engaging and including citizens into the conceptualisation, development, implementation and decommissioning of policies and tech, data subjects are relegated to data objects. In this presentation, we argue that principled design and citizen inclusion at crucial stages of pandemic control responses can preserve the rights and integrity of all individuals during the crisis (and beyond) without jeopardising efficacy. We reject the position that there must be a trade-off between personal data protection and health security. In our work, digital self-determination has the potential to make surveillance technologies (including the data it produces and shares) more legitimate from the data subject’s perspective, thereby aiding in more robust control policies.
About the TiGRE Webinars
Trust & Regulatory Governance in an Age of Crisis - Issues of trust and regulation stand at the centre of social science analysis in the last decades. They are becoming even more important nowadays with the Covid-19 crisis. Our aim in this series of seminar talks is to present the basic scholarly concepts and ideas around the topic; to promote an advanced analysis and to discuss the issues on the agenda from a theoretical, historical and comparative perspective.
Find out more at - https://www.tigre-project.eu/webinars/regulatory_governance/
Last updated on 02 Feb 2021 .