  Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control
the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy (Sharma &
Bashir 2020, Tang 2020). This emphasis reveals significant challenges to
ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine
justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result
solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis (Floridi &
Strait 2020), preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology.
Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the
relationship between individuals and governments as adversarial, entrenches
technology platforms as gatekeepers, and supports a conception of emergency
public health authority as limited by individual consent and considerable
corporate influence that is in some tension with the more communitarian values
that typically inform public health ethics. To overcome the barriers to ethical
and effective DCT, and develop infrastructure and policy that supports the
realization of potential public benefits of digital technology, a public
resource conception of aggregate data should be developed.
