ABSTRACT
Introduction Networked technologies that collect data from the environment and transmit those data to others are increasingly being built into our homes, schools, streets, offices, and shopping centres. In this way, both Ring and Alexa become vectors of infection that, like mould spores, each alight in a particular location to spread out and join up with other points of infection. Because of this bottom up sideways growth, smartness spreads to create something bigger than the sum of its smart parts. [...]it may in the future spread to others-if there is any lesson of surveillance technology procurement by police, it is that the same access is soon granted to multiple state agencies for a plethora of purposes. From there, the infection spread onto the computers of students and ultimately thereafter into the private houses and bedrooms of students via the mandatory cameras needed, apparently, to check for the "right kind" of behaviour during examinations. [...]the private space of the household itself becomes infected as the camera is used to assess whether the space and its contents are compliant with the rules set by the algorithms that drive the system. Initiatives like Saudi Arabia's 170km linear city of NEOM, or Nevada's proposed Special Investment Zones, take the most extremely exclusionary form of capitalist life and, using smart technologies, attempt to secure it and its entrepreneurial inhabitants or operators against the tide of social and ecological breakdown, even as that tide is rising thanks to the same capitalist processes.
ABSTRACT
Contact-tracing apps could help keep countries open before a vaccine is available. But do we have a sufficient understanding of their efficacy, and can we balance protecting public health with safeguarding civil rights? We interviewed five experts, with backgrounds in digital health ethics, internet law and social sciences.