Health tech: friend or foe to our fundamental rights in the fight against the pandemic
(2022) Constitutionalism under pressure from pandemic — Location: Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain (26.May.2022)
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- Authors
Mocanu, Diana 
- Abstract
- As suggested by its deliberately polarized title, this contribution will explore the extremes in public discourse, policy and enforcement when it comes to technology being used to tackle the ubiquitous coronavirus public health emergency, with the aim of mapping a middle ground, steering safe from both dystopian surveillance and technological solutionism in so doing. It will be informed by concrete use cases of health tech, such as contact tracing, digital COVID certificates, AI-based automated decision making for triage, diagnosis, or even chatbots for combating vaccine hesitancy, the trade-offs in terms of fundamental rights of which will be weighed both in terms of their design and of their practical use. The recent legally baseless use of contact tracing information in an ongoing criminal investigation in Germany for example will be looked at as an overreach of those whose concern goes so far as to push them to argue for relinquishing privacy in favour of protection, thus finding itself at the other end of the spectrum from the absolute non-interference allegedly protected via antivaccine and conspiracy narratives, while ultimately still infringing (albeit different) rights. Several other examples will be used to understand and ultimately minimize the toll on fundamental rights of these tensions between our current willingness or opposition to putting our lives under the magnifying glass of governments and tech companies alike, if not the microscopes of big pharma, in the collective hope of rendering the risks of the pandemic manageable.
- Affiliations
Citations
Mocanu, D. (2022). Health tech: friend or foe to our fundamental rights in the fight against the pandemic. Constitutionalism under pressure from pandemic, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/102974