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Automating Care: Online Food Delivery Work During the CoVID-19 Crisis in India
5th ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT 2022 ; : 160-172, 2022.
Article in English | Scopus | ID: covidwho-1932814
ABSTRACT
On March 23, 2020, the Government of India (GoI) announced one of the strictest nationwide lockdowns in the world to curb the spread of novel SARS-CoV-2, otherwise known as CoVID-19. The country came to a standstill overnight and the service industry, including small businesses and restaurants, took a massive financial hit. The unknown nature of the virus and its spread deepened anxiety among the general public, quickly turning to distrust towards any "outside"contact with goods and people. In the hopes of (re)building consumer trust, food delivery platforms Zomato and Swiggy began providing digital solutions to exhibit care towards their customers, including (1) sharing delivery workers' live temperatures alongside the workers' profile inside the app;(2) mandating the use of the controversial contact tracing app Aarogya Setu for the workers;(3) monitoring workers' usage of masks through random selfie requests;and (4) sharing specific worker vaccination details on the app for customers to view, including vaccination date and the vaccine's serial number. Such invasive data gathering infrastructures to address public health threats have long focused on the surveillance of laborers, migrants, and the bodies of other marginalized communities. Framed as public health management, such biometric and health data gathering is treated as a necessary feature of caring for the well-being of the general public. However, such datafication practices - ones which primarily focus on the extraction of data from one specific community in order to mollify the concerns of another - normalizes the false perception that disease is transmitted unidirectionally from worker to the consumer. By centering food delivery workers' experiences during the pandemic and examining the normalization of such surveillance in the name of care and recovery, this paper aims to examine how new regimes of care are manufactured and legitimized using harmful and unethical datafication practices. © 2022 ACM.
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Full text: Available Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: Scopus Language: English Journal: 5th ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT 2022 Year: 2022 Document Type: Article

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Full text: Available Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: Scopus Language: English Journal: 5th ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT 2022 Year: 2022 Document Type: Article