Could Contact-Tracing Apps Help With the Hantavirus? Contact-tracing apps were widely deployed during the Covid pandemic. After three people died on a cruise ship struck by a hantavirus, authorities are actively tracking down 29 people who had left the ship. They're trying to trace the spread of the virus. It's a long, arduous, global process to find and notify people who might be at risk of infection.

COVID-19 has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives. Across the world, countries applied wildly varying mitigation strategies for the epidemic, ranging from minimal intrusion in the hope of obtaining "herd immunity", to imposing severe lockdowns on the other extreme. It seems clear at the first glance what all those measures are trying to achieve, and what the criteria of success are. But is it really that clear? Quoting an oft-repeated phrase, with COVID-19 we fight an unprecedented threat to health and economic stability [Soltani et al., 2020]. While fighting it, we must protect privacy, equality and fairness [Morley et al., 2020] and do a coordinated assessment of usefulness, effectiveness, technological readiness, cyber security risks and threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights [Stollmeyer et al., 2020]. Taken together, this is hardly a straightforward set of goals and requirements. Thus, paraphrasing [Stollmeyer et al., 2020], one may ask: What problem does a COVID mitigation strategy solve exactly? 1

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives. Across the world, countries have applied various mitigation strategies for the epidemic, based on social, political, and technological instruments. We postulate that one should {identify the relevant requirements} before committing to a particular mitigation strategy. One way to achieve it is through an overview of what is considered relevant by the general public, and referred to in the media. To this end, we have collected a number of news clips that mention the possible goals and requirements for a mitigation strategy. The snippets are sorted thematically into several categories, such as health-related goals, social and political impact, civil rights, ethical requirements, and so on. In a forthcoming companion paper, we will present a digest of the requirements, derived from the news clips, and a preliminary take on their formal specification.

For those engaged in advocacy around the social harms of AI systems, a definitional exercise could, however, be a key way to rescue AI from the abstract, and foreground social and material concerns around these systems. Just as glossy data visualizations can obscure the unequal impacts and governance failures of the pandemic, AI as an abstract buzzword can be brandished against complex social problems as if it were a neutral and external'solution' rather than a sociotechnical system 14 designed and developed to make value-laden choices and trade-offs.

As countries across the world grapple with the novel coronavirus, there has been a significant effort to integrate input from sources, from surveillance cameras to point-of-sale systems and connected health devices. The trend has highlighted the power of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments for public data collection as well as the technology's privacy-eroding potential. South Korea, for instance, has aggregated data from IoT devices and smartphones to create detailed logs of its citizens' behavior. The nation has documented where residents went, how long they stayed, who accompanied them and whether they were wearing a mask. Part of an aggressive approach, the South Korean strategy, which includes extensive testing for the novel coronavirus, has proven to be largely effective in curbing infection without closing businesses or mandating universal quarantines.

The WHO intends to be one of the users of the website. Over time, access is expected to expand to include a wider group of policy makers and government officials. Thus far the site, which is password-protected and not yet available to the public, focuses on three topics. The first is the contact-tracing through mobile apps and AI of people with Covid-19. The goal of contact-tracing apps is to track, notify and isolate people who might have been exposed to the virus.

If your organization is implementing or thinking of implementing a contact-tracing app, it's wise to consider more than just workforce safety. Failing to do so could expose your company other risks such as employment-related lawsuits and compliance issues. More fundamentally, companies should be thinking about the ethical implications of their AI use. Contact-tracing apps are raising a lot of questions. For example, should employers be able to use them? If so, must employees opt-in or can employers make them mandatory?