Dear CodeVsCOVID19 initiators
We are basel.codes, a collective of designers and coders interested in the creative potential of digital technology.
We came across your online Hackathon and find it an exciting initiative. There is no doubt that digital technology has the potential to be of great assistance to society during these difficult times.
However, we also came across some highly controversial topics listed on your page. For example “Using surveillance cameras, determine whether the distance between people is being maintained and trigger an acoustic signal if not”.
Especially the challenge category “Corona Tracking” includes proposals that raise significant ethical questions. For example, the “Covid contact tracker” proposes to develop an app which “informs people when they come into contact with or come near Corona infected people”. This bears the danger of stigmatization and exclusion of infected citizens. Other proposals like “CoRisk” plan to develop solutions that aim at an “Automated, anonymous acquisition of geoposition data in the background by a mobile application”. Such technological solutions have the potential to undermine people’s privacy and expose security holes in devices.
As the organizer of this event and under the patronage of the Swiss Confederation, we believe that it is your responsibility to ensure that digital technology is used in the interest of all citizens and respects ethical principles and fundamental rights such as privacy.
Contemporary guidelines, like the MyData initiative, that aim at human-centered data processing, as well as a board that critically reviews proposals like the mentioned ones, should be a fundamental part of this hackathon.
With this being said, we hope that this hackathon leads to a wealth of solutions that improve the current situation without simultaneously disregarding ethical principles or privacy rights.
Best regards, Max Frischknecht, Mark Iandovka, Alain Brusch, Yann Patrick Martins, Andrea Zaccuri, Ted Davis, Pedro Neves, Arianna Smaron & Lena Frei of basel.codes