Thank you for posting this, Christian. We at UC San Diego have not been given an app yet but I'm sure it is in the works. We had a townhall about similar concerns about data use and blurry lines between public health and research. We summarized our townhall, published for our campus specifically here in case folks are curious: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q7O4rwe6IeEBMAlt2wortNpWyLSGFAYYQzO8X91O... <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q7O4rwe6IeEBMAlt2wortNpWyLSGFAYYQzO8X91OX2Y/edit> On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 12:23 PM Christian Sandvig <csandvig@umich.edu> wrote:
Dear AIR-L friends,
I bet many of you are among the millions who are just about to be required to install a new coronavirus-related app by your university. I'm writing to announce that the ESC Center has just released 15 best practices for pandemic apps at US universities. It is a very short read. Here is the list:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://esc.umich.edu/pandemic-apps/__;!!Mih3wA!X...
My own personal takeaways are: [1.] App experts aren't recommending apps. (At least, not for many of the things they are being deployed to do.) And [2.] The apps being deployed right now by universities are deviating widely from good practice in terms of human rights and software development.
These apps are doing all kinds of unexpected things in the name of the pandemic. A great example is Albion College, which reportedly just deployed the Genetworx Aura app to geofence its campus. If you live on campus and decide to go into town, they lock you out of your house. Source:
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/19/coronavirus-al...
I'd be interested in any thoughts on how your university app measures up.
Please feel free to forward this if you know of a good audience for it.
Christian
-- Christian Sandvig Director, Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Information, Communication, & Media University of Michigan
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