March 27, 2020

expert comment on the benefits and challenges of using apps and social media to monitor COVID-19

There has been discussion in the media about the benefits and challenges benefits and challenges of using apps and social media to monitor COVID-19.

Professor Mark Skilton, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Network at Warwick Business School and expert in digital communications, said:

“The use of an app to track COVID-19 symptoms raises a key conflict between the need for mass surveillance on the spread of the virus and the issues of confidentiality, privacy, and consent concerning any data obtained.

“Anonymous data is commonly used in medical trials to test new and existing drugs, but that is consensual because participants are asked at the outset for permission to use their medical data.

“Use of data from an app – or from Google and Facebook, as has also been suggested – is an altogether more complex issue. It would involve tracking user locations and tagging symptoms and behaviour patterns related to Covid-19.

“We do have legal precedent for law enforcement accessing mobile phones and private data in the case of terrorism and cybersecurity breaches, but large scale studies of medical data is ethically much more difficult, as previous attempts to use NHS records have shown.

“Using devices on our mobile phone to monitor certain data and send messages to change people’s behaviour may sound Orwellian, but with this pandemic turning into a long game, we may need to use all the digital tools at our disposal.

“COVID-19 is an emergency on such a huge scale that, if anonymity is managed and appropriately used, apps and even social media platforms could actually play a responsible part in helping to build collective crowd intelligence for social good rather than profit.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19/

Declared interests

None received.