Pandemic Innovation: The Private Sector and the Development of Contact-Tracing and Exposure Notification Apps

Abstract

From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology companies have participated in the search for solutions to new challenges. One of these has been the need for public health authorities to engage in contact-tracing to help curb the spread of the disease. Manual contact-tracing for public health purposes is a well-established component of the management of epidemics and pandemics. Public health authorities identify infected individuals, question them about close contacts, and then reach out to those contacts with the appropriate public health advice. From the outset of the pandemic, many believed that technology could play a role in supplementing manual contact-tracing. How it could do so quickly became tied to issues of how it should do so, engendering a normative discussion affecting the partnership between business and government in the large-scale design and deployment of technology for public health surveillance.