Abstract During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Contact Tracing Has Become Part of Government Efforts to Achieve Societal Resilience

Paper to be presented at DRUID21 Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark October 18-20, 2021

What does contact tracing really mean?: How governments and citizens contest the meaning of contact tracing to achieve societal resilience

Semi Min New York University Technology, Operations, and Statistics [email protected] Hil Lifshitz-Assaf New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business [email protected] Natalia Levina New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business [email protected]

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing has become part of government efforts to achieve societal resilience. The notion of societal resilience encompasses preserving not only public safety, but also civil rights and liberties and the economic security of citizens. Yet, as demonstrated by the pandemic, the diverse values involved in building resilient societies often come into conflict. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework that uses Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) for understanding how societies confront these conflicting values as they strive to build societal resilience with new technologies. We elaborate our framework by investigating how two societies, South Korea and Singapore, tried to build societal resilience with contact tracing technologies. We show how the contestation process over conflicting values unfolded through the government making specific design choices for these technologies and drawing social boundaries around their intended use and through the public adopting or resisting these technologies. This process was shaped by the public discourse over contested societal values. We contribute to the understanding of digitally-enabled societal resilience by showing how the battle over the meaning of new technologies reflects the deeper battle over which societal values are worthy of preserving in the face of a threat.

What does contact tracing really mean?: How governments and citizens contest the meaning

of contact tracing to achieve societal resilience

INTRODUCTION

The 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic has forced many societies to define what societal resilience means to them. While the preservation of population is at the core of resilience, nations were struggling to define which aspects of societal life should persist through the pandemic. As many societies strive to build resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, they look towards technology to address the tensions that arise in dealing with this crisis (Gkeredakis et al. 2021). One prominent tension that poses a threat to human life is guaranteeing public safety while preserving civil liberties and economic security (Joyner et al. 2004). In fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, this tension has been pronounced, when governments are trying to implement contact tracing technologies.

Contact tracing is a process that can be employed by governments to slow down the spread of infectious diseases (CDC 2020). The process not only involves contact identification but also contact notification, follow-up, and quarantining. Contact tracing is not a new phenomenon; it has been used by health authorities to control infectious diseases for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, requires rapid identification and isolation of exposed individuals because pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people can spread the disease. Unlike prior pandemics where contact tracing was primarily a manual process with limited scalability, which diminishes its value in stopping a rapidly spreading disease like COVID-19, today digital tools offer a hope to enable efficient contact tracing

(Anglemyer et al. 2020). Hence, before the COVID-19 vaccination became a possibility, contact tracing technologies were adopted by societies as a solution to achieve societal resilience.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw each affected society struggle to balance conflicting priorities associated with implementing contact tracing while preserving the civil

liberties and economic security of its citizens. In this study, we address the question: How societies strive to achieve societal resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic through contact tracing technologies? We explore the contestation processes around contact tracing technologies as they unfolded in South Korea and Singapore.

To develop a theory addressing our research question, we have conducted an archival study, analyzing news articles from the outbreak of the pandemic until the vaccine’s approval as contacting tracing were the main technologies used in societies to ensure societal resilience. We followed the research design of similar field-level studies that used archival data to study the time of crisis (Hsu and Grodal 2021). Our research contributes to the understanding of digitally-enabled societal resilience by showing how the battle over the meaning of new technologies reflects the deeper battle over which societal values are worthy of preserving when facing a threat.

BACKGROUND LITERATURE

Societal resilience

The notion of resilience originated in ecology, where Holling (1973) defined ecological system resilience as “the persistence of systems and their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between population or state variables'' (p. 14). The notion was eventually adopted in social sciences, where it was defined as the ability of social entities to tolerate, cope with, and adjust to various threats (Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013). Social scientists argue that social resilience is enabled by leveraging technological innovations, policy reforms, and cultural and social resources to reorganize society, often through creating novel discourses in the face of threat.

Specifically, Adger (2000) suggested that the transformation of society to achieve societal resilience can take place when there is shared knowledge and discourse that support such changes.

While the exact definition of societal resilience is subject to debate (Benedikter & Fahl

2017), it has become evident that societal resilience encompasses more than population safety. A key approach to defining societal resilience that emerged in recent years is based on the Human

Rights framework. For example, building on the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of

Human Rights (UDHR) (Assembly 1948), the Brookings Institution has proposed a “Human Rights- based approach to building societal resilience to natural disasters.” It calls upon policymakers to focus on human rights as they decide which aspects of society are worth preserving through a crisis

(Kälin 2011). Yet, as many societies strive to build resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, they encounter tensions when a society wants to provide safety for its citizens, while preserving tenets associated with civil liberties and economic security (Joyner et al. 2004).

The interplay between social values and technologies

A well-known tension arising from the COVID-19 contact tracing is sacrificing individuals’ privacy to protect the population from biological threats. Recent research shows that when it comes to using smartphone location data for COVID-19 contact tracing effort, individuals’ willingness to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of public safety varies depending on one’s political ideology, causing resistance in certain areas (Ghose et al., 2019). The tension between privacy and public safety, however, is not a unique phenomenon that is confined to the time of crises. Scholars have had a long-standing discussion of the security and privacy trade-offs appearing in various contexts.

Research suggests while drones can be used to protect public safety facilitating search, rescue, and forensics, using drones has the potential to cause privacy issues (Vattapparamban et al. 2016).

Relying on the Internet of Things for traffic monitoring to protect public safety also raised concerns about privacy (Elmaghraby and Losavio 2014). Similar tension appeared when the government used

digital technologies to enable societal resilience as part of public policing (e.g., NSA) (Weinstein et al. 2015).

Despite their prominence in the discourse, privacy and public safety are not the only values involved in the contestation process around contact tracing technologies. Scholars suggested that using contact tracing technologies involves issues around freedom of movement and fairness, which affect the individuals’ acceptability of the measures (Voo et al. 2021). In organizational theory, discourse studies have examined the negotiation process to produce shared meanings to achieve the adoption of new technologies but scholars have paid limited attention to the implementation and use of these technologies, focusing rather on the shaping of the narrative (Hsu and Grodal 2021).

Tensions in security policy compliance behaviors

Rule compliance literature investigated the individual’s motivations to comply with or break the rules in organizational contexts. In this literature, the rule-breaking behavior is often explained in terms of self-interested motivations or fears arising from the possible negative outcomes (Baskerville et al. 2014).

Recently, scholars have begun investigating how tensions associated with policy compliance get negotiated. For example, Karjalainen et al. (2019) investigated how employees’ motivation for engaging in security behaviors, which refer to certain behaviors with security implications (e.g., selecting a password, locking a computer), changes over time. Their inductive analysis uncovered a dynamic dialectic process, which can explain the behavior changes that occur through the negotiation between opposing individual values. De Vaujany et al. (2018) suggested that

IT artifacts materialize rules and elicit certain practices, which, in turn, comply with or violate rules.

However, materialized rules often become invisible and cause noncompliance, and thus, sense- making activities are required (i.e., creating, negotiating, and maintaining the meaning of rules).

Overall, these studies offer valuable insights by focusing on how rule compliance behaviors emerge and change through the contestation process that involves not only through discourse but also through the implementation and use of technologies.

THEORETICAL FRAMING

To systematically analyze the tension amongst societal values in the context of design, implementation, and use of contact tracing technologies, we propose to use the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which defines the societal values as basic human rights worthy of being protected by governments.

Human Rights framework for understanding development and adoption of technology for societal resilience

When societies introduce new technologies to achieve societal resilience, the diverse values captured in UDHR often come into conflict, causing resistance from the public. The tension may arise when the members of the society have different interpretations of technologies. In such circumstances, the society negotiate the meaning of technologies by making provisional agreements on the priorities of societal values. The importance of creating shared meanings that legitimize the technologies has been recognized as a key mechanism for adapting society to achieve societal resilience. For example, Larsen et al. (2011) suggested that “resilience theory…needs to acknowledge and incorporate much more explicitly the role of stakeholder agency and the process through which legitimate visions of resilience are generated” (p. 491).

In the wake of atrocities committed during World War II, the United Nations proposed

UDHR as a guiding framework for national governments to create societies that respect human rights (Nickel 1987). Considered a foundational document in the history of human rights, UDHR has been used as a symbolic resource as legal and political discourse. The member states of the

United Nations have elaborated UDHR to create international treaties, national constitutions, and legal codes (Baderin and Ssenyonjo 2010). UDHR has also been used for collective action as a source of legitimacy. More broadly, UDHR has served as a repository of cultural elements from which people might borrow and combine to create the meanings of practices (e.g., countering terrorism) or new technologies (e.g., drones, genetic engineering).

While human rights advocates have proposed to use UDHR as a basis for societal resilience

(Kälin 2011), doing so in practice reveals various tensions amongst 30 articles comprising the framework. For example, placing in quarantine a patient violates the freedom of movement (Article

13). Letting people move around and taking the chance of furthering the spread of the infection violates the rights to life, liberty, and security (Article 3). Closing the business venues during the lockdown can be a violation of economic rights (Article 23). Like this, the COVID-19 contact tracing effort raises issues beyond simple public safety-privacy tradeoffs. Hence, we propose the

UDHR as a framework that allows a multifaceted analysis of the tensions between social values that appear in the different societies.

These tensions become crystallized when societies are debating the meaning of new technologies. This paper investigates how contact tracing technologies were used for building societal resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allows us to further develop our theoretical framework by investigating how diverse societal values encoded in UDHR are contested through public discourse over the design, implementation, and use of these contract tracking technologies.

METHODS

Comparative Case Analysis Research Design

We adopted a constructivist grounded theory approach to build novel theoretical insights from data while also embracing conceptual insights from extant academic theories (Charmaz 2006). Because

our study focused on understanding the contestation process over the meanings of technologies, we needed to engage in interpretive process theorizing. This is a very labor-intensive research approach, which usually means that only one in-depth longitudinal case is analyzed by researchers. We believed that comparing two in-depth cases would strengthen our theorizing (Barley 1990; Bechky et al. 2015) as comparative analysis helps scholars practice “radical doubt” (Bourdieu and Wacquant

1992, p. 235) and understand better whether emergent insights are idiosyncratic to a given case.

Case Selection

As the pandemic took hold in early 2020, we started exploring the public discourse around the role of contact tracing. By July of 2020, we narrowed our focus to countries that were seen by public health experts as effectively controlling the pandemic, in part, by establishing some form of contact tracing (Han et al. 2020). While there are known problems associated with “sampling on success,” we felt this focus was justified as the first step. In the selection process among “successful” countries, it became clear that European countries were a poor choice due to fully or partially open physical borders, making it challenging to disentangle country-level versus regional phenomena.

Additionally, some “successful” Asian countries were excluded due to our lack of language skills necessary to form an in-depth understanding of relevant public discourses (e.g., China, Japan,

Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Vietnam). Three countries remained—New Zealand, South

Korea, and Singapore. We chose South Korea (henceforth Korea) and Singapore, due to the geographical isolation of New Zealand potentially making comparisons difficult.

In addition, Korea and Singapore exhibited various contextual similarities relevant to our study. First, they both have controlled borders but are not completely isolated from their neighbors

(Data 2020). Both countries are also highly urbanized, potentially providing a disadvantage in containing the pandemic, though they have high-level smartphone penetration (above 80%),

enabling their use for contact tracing. Most importantly, Korea and Singapore were both well- positioned to provide a COVID-19 pandemic response given the lessons the public health officials learned from prior respiratory disease epidemics (Data 2020). After these epidemics, both countries changed their regulatory procedures and public health systems to prepare for the next epidemic. The legal frameworks for the disease-prevention policies were designed to provide health authorities with warrantless access to personal data. Hence, shortly after identifying the first COVID-19 cases, each government immediately established contact tracing procedures by drawing on protocols already in place.

Despite these similarities, the two countries had significant differences relevant to our inquiry. Specifically, Singapore had a higher percentage of immigrants (38% vs 2% in Korea) and higher diversity of cultures as compared to Korea. Moreover, while the World Bank (2019) ranked both countries as having highly effective government, as compared to other high-to-middle income countries (Singapore was among the highest on many dimensions), it also ranked Singapore as significantly weaker than Korea (and other high-to-middle income countries) in terms of citizens’ voice and government accountability.

Data Collection and Analysis

To capture the contestation over the meaning of digitally-enabled contact tracing in Singapore and

Korea, we collected archival data from newspapers on the technologies, actions, and discourse of relevant stakeholders. Newspapers play a significant role in influencing the perceptions and expectations around novel technologies (Hsu and Grodal 2021). Traditional media have been a valuable source of data to investigate societal phenomena because they constitute “the court of public opinion” (Habermas et al. 1974) and can “both influence and reflect societal values” (Lamin and

Zaheer 2012, p. 56).

We conducted keyword searches on different databases to extract relevant articles. For

Singapore, we identified news articles published by local media from the ProQuest database using the keywords Singapore, contact tracing, technology, and COVID. After initial analysis, we expanded the keyword list to include specific digital tools (e.g., TraceTogether, TraceTogether token,

SafeEntry, Wristband, etc.). We quickly discovered that critical views about Singapore’s government measures were not well reflected in the Singaporean news stories due to stringent media regulation. A global association of journalists has expressed concern over Singapore's censoring of critical views on government response to the COVID-19 pandemic by using the law entitled

“Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act” (Thum 2020). Hence, we supplemented our Singapore case with foreign media and community blogging platforms. A total of 443 articles on Singapore (from January to September 2020) were used.

For the Korean case study, we retrieved data from the BigKinds database, providing news articles in leading local daily newspapers and broadcasting companies. We began searching using the keywords Corona, contact tracing technology, and epidemiological investigation (a term often used to refer to contact tracing in Korea). We later expanded our data by including keywords referring to specific digital tools (check-in system, SafetyBand, electronic bracelets, and Self- quarantine Safety Protection App.) The final analysis used 451 articles (from January and September

2020).

In developing our theory, we first conducted an emic analysis for each country. We then wrote memos to identify conceptual categories commonly found in each case and conducted a cross- case comparison. We identified three stages in each setting, with the beginning and endpoints for each phase demarcated when we perceived ‘‘continuity in the activities within each period and... certain discontinuities at frontiers’’ (Langley 1999, p. 703). These analyses helped us narrow down

key emergent concepts and relate them to our theoretical concept. Because one of the central themes in our analysis was the tension between human rights concerns, we drew on political science literature and UN frameworks for unpacking this tension. Finally, we went through various extant theories relevant to our emergent themes and concepts to deepen our theoretical development

(Charmaz 1996).

FINDINGS

Korea

Starting point: The soft introduction of contact tracing (January - early February 2020)

Korean government tracked the movements and contacts of confirmed COVID-19 cases based on interviews, credit card records, mobile phone data, and closed-circuit television footage of confirmed patients (Data 2020). The Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act (IDCPA), amended after the MERS outbreak in 2015, gave authorities greater ability to collect data. The government not only published the movements of confirmed cases on a central website but also shared it through text messages to help citizens avoid hotspots.

Stage 1: Contestation emerges over contact tracing technologies (mid-February - March 2020)

The number of COVID-19 cases increased rapidly after a member of the Shincheonji Church, which mainstream churches considered a cult, tested positive for the virus in February 2020 (Yahoo 2020).

Some local authorities strongly blamed Shincheonji members, describing them as evil or even murderers. Local media amplified negative sentiments by using stimulating terms and highlighting their mysterious practice, which fostered public outrage. The disclosure of personal information made it possible to identify specific individuals, and their personal information was rapidly circulated on social media. An online petition filed with the presidential office to disband the church collected 75,000 signatures, and many questioned whether Shincheonji members could be criminally

prosecuted. The Seoul city government sued the religious group's founder for murder and causing harm. Their headquarters was raided and accused of intentionally hampering contact tracing. The government also passed legislation to punish individuals suspected of being infected who deliberately avoided testing and refused hospitalization after positive tests (Korea 2020a).

The government also focused on advancing its contact tracing technologies and developed the Epidemiological Investigation Support System to expedite the data collection and contact tracing process (Korea 2020a). This platform reduces the time spent on data collection from 3 days to 10 minutes, by automating the process that was previously coordinated through phone calls and emails.

In addition, the government developed a “Self-quarantine safety protection app.” to efficiently monitor quarantined individuals. The app has two key functions: (1) self-diagnosis and submission of the results to the assigned local public officers and (2) GPS-based location tracking to prevent possible violations of self-quarantine orders. The public officers were notified and took necessary actions when quarantine rules were violated.

The societal values in tension. The Shincheonji outbreak was the catalyst for the contestation over societal values around contact tracing technologies. Shincheonji group experienced contact tracing as excessive surveillance, which caused forced outing and social damage across their social networks.

As contact tracing was likened to criminal investigations, Shincheonji members refused to participate in contact tracing by hiding and lying (Cho 2020). Some members tragically committed suicide due to stigmatization and fear. As the stigma intensified, members began insisting that the government’s measures violate human rights such as rights to privacy, and more broadly, freedom of religion1.

1 Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

The authorities claimed that it was inevitable to limit the patients’ right to privacy to protect the safety of the majority (Kwak 2020). The labeling strategy of the Self-quarantine safety protection app. shows its emphasis on safety and protection. The public accepted the government-proposed value. A survey showed that about 84% of Koreans viewed privacy loss as a necessary tradeoff for protecting public health (ibid).

Reaching a provisional agreement through contestation. Shincheonji members’ claim gained support from other religious rights communities (e.g, The United States Commission on

International Religious Freedom, Human Rights Without Frontiers), with the suggestion that the government had attempted to transfer responsibility to a marginalized group (Weiner 2020). Some of the public began to raise a cautious voice regarding information disclosure, as more people from different groups felt the impact of private information leakage. A study at Seoul National University showed that for the public, “criticisms and further damage” were much more feared than being infected or even death (BBC 2020). The National Human Rights Commission called for an appropriate balance between respecting the right to security of the public and the right to privacy of patients, highlighting that patient travels history and contacts were “unnecessarily specific,” causing psychological injury and discouraging self-reporting (Park 2020). Subsequently, the public and the government agreed that achieving goals of contact tracing technologies was unlikely without addressing the concern about the right to privacy.

Modifying technologies based on provisional agreement. To accommodate the shared understanding, a guideline for data collection and disclosure was created, limiting the way the data is utilized (Jung 2020a). The guideline included three updates; (1) the logs should be time-limited to one day before the symptoms occurred until the date of quarantine, (2) the close contacts should be determined based on the patient’s symptoms, exposure conditions, and timing, and (3) “personally

identifiable information” including work and home addresses should be excluded. With this modification, the authorities could address the concern about the right to privacy and possible resistance to contact tracing which threaten the right to security of the public.

Stage 2: Contestation resurges around quarantine monitoring technologies (April 2020)

In April, to break the transmission between incoming travelers and the local community, Korea made testing, a 14-day quarantine, and the use of the Safety protection app. mandatory for all inbound travelers (Hwang 2020). Such measures were justified by the need for protecting the right to security, emphasizing that sick arrivals may increase community infections. However, people often faked the use of the app. by leaving their phones at home to avoid GPS tracking (Kim 2020f).

To enforce quarantine orders, a new law was created to levy fines to rule violators (Kim

2020f). The government also designed electronic bracelets that could be used to determine whether an individual was with their phone, in order to enforce the use of the Self-quarantine safety protection app (Chung 2020). The combination of the app, with a Bluetooth signal connected to the electronic bracelet enabled the distance between them to be calculated. Electronic bracelets generated an alarm at 20 meters from the registered phone and sent a report to the designated local authorities. The authorities announced the plan to monitor ‘all people under quarantine’ with the app paired with an electronic bracelet (ibid). It was a radical shift from the previous decisions, where the use of the quarantine monitoring app was not compulsory for domestic cases, with a 65% adoption rate.

The societal values in tension. There was public resistance toward the electronic bracelet. The challengers argued that, unlike inbound travelers, there was no legal basis for mandating domestic cases to wear them (Oh 2020). The public perceived that the electronic bracelets undermined civil liberties (e.g., freedom from arbitrary detention2), as similar technology—electronic anklets— is

2 Article 9: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

used to surveil criminals. A physician shared the meaning shift from the protection of life to surveillance and control:

“We successfully curb the virus through voluntary participation cooperation, and solidarity, not control and surveillance...Using electronic bracelets is a measure that makes individuals potential threats that need control, not the patient in need of protection…The government is too inspired by past success (Ban 2020).” Civic groups criticized the use of an electronic bracelet as a byproduct of administrative expediency, designed without human rights considerations (Jung 2020b). The key argument was violators comprised less than 1% of quarantining individuals, and so were not a significant threat to the public.

Fragmenting social boundaries and modifying technologies. In response, the government used labeling strategies to signal that the electronic bracelets were designed to protect the public’s right to security. The term used to refer to the electronic bracelets changed to ‘wristbands’ and back to

‘SafetyBand’ (Yoo 2020) and were physically labeled with the words “Safe Korea”. Discursive action alone, however, was not sufficient to shift the public’s perceived meaning of the SafetyBand.

The authorities agreed that the SafetyBand does have a surveillance nature and restricted its use for surveilling quarantine violators, after obtaining consent (Shin 2020). They also redesigned the contact tracing technologies. In response to the concerns that sounding an alarm in public venues may promote social stigma, the authorities removed the function of generating a warning alarm when the user moved away from the phone or attempted to take off the SafetyBand (Kim 2020d). Instead, the alarm would sound only on the designated officer’s devices. At the same time, a function displaying an alarm when the phone hasn’t moved for a certain period of time was added to detect if the user is near the phone. With these changes, the authorities tried to distance the negatively valenced values from the SafetyBand.

Stage 3: Contestation resurfacing from LGBTQ community (May-early September 2020)

After a sustained period of COVID-19 cases reported below 20, a COVID-positive individual was found to have visited at least five nightclubs in May 2020 (Ankel 2020). More than 1,300 potential contacts were urged to self-isolate and get tested. Securing accurate lists of nightclub-goers was challenging, as name lists were either incomplete or inaccurate, as many people provided fake names.

Furthermore, while the authorities did not release the identity of the nightclubs, the local media reported that the infected person visited LBGTQ clubs (ibid). Homosexuality is not illegal in Korea, but discrimination remains rampant. Most LGBTQ individuals choose to keep their sexuality hidden from families and colleagues. During the testing stage of contact tracing, many people were outed by the press or through public information disclosure. Some social media users posted video footage of the nightclubs and urged followers for donations “to help put a stop to these disgusting goings- on” (ibid). Subsequent COVID-positive individuals were labeled “gay,” resulting in a widespread refusal to participate in contact tracing.

The LGBTQ community claimed that the information disclosure was unhelpful as a prevention effort and may result in invading rights to privacy (Martin 2020). The LGBTQ rights organizations coalesced to issue a statement criticizing the government's publication of sensitive information. An online petition asked the government to mediate "anti-human rights and biased media reports.”

Modifying technologies to address tension. The public concerns were centered around information disclosure and subsequent stigmatization of marginalized groups, which violates the right to privacy, and more broadly, rights to equality. In response, local authorities offered anonymous testing that only collects phone numbers and no other personal information (Kim 2020a), with a resultant 8-fold increase in the number of tests. Furthermore, KCDC created a new guideline to regulate the use of information-sharing technology, enabling the authorities to keep locations confidential when all the

exposures were identified (Hahn 2020). Movement history should be deleted from the websites,

COVID-related apps, and news articles after two weeks. Some local governments created dedicated teams to redact published location data from social media, blogs, and online forums. Simultaneously, the authorities proposed a new technology to complement the existing contact tracing technologies, which used QR codes to record visitors at venues (Donga 2020).

Public resistance to the new technology. Although the nightclub COVID outbreak began in high- risk entertainment facilities, in the trial of the QR-codes check-in system, the authorities announced that the use of the tool was not limited to these facilities by including churches, libraries, theaters, etc (Donga 2020). The government stated that “the reason why the pilot project is not limited to high-risk facilities is that we are planning to expand the scope of application to general facilities”

(ibid). In response, the public questioned the appropriateness of the social boundary around the system (Oh 2020). According to the enforcement decree of IDCPA, data collection should be limited to people suspected of being infected, while the QR code check-in system collected travel logs of healthy individuals, which were stored on the government’s server. Challengers claimed that the QR code check-in system was excessive surveillance as it did not intend to prevent contact with infected persons in the pursuit of administrative expediency. The media highlighted the discomfort and increasingly framed this technology as a gateway to a surveillance society.

Drawing social boundaries and modifying technologies. People accept privacy loss because they agreed with the government’s goal of protecting the public’s right to security by controlling threats.

Thus, who or what is the real threat is the important factor in determining the range of application of a tool. As the public and the government agreed that users of high-risk facilities are potential threats, the government mandated the QR code check-in system only for high-risk facilities (Choi

2020). In addition, the authorities revised the technology’s design in a way that restricted data

collection from the suspected infectees. Specifically, the data such as visitor's name, phone number, and time of entry should be divided, encrypted, and stored on two separate servers (QR code generating company and the government). These data are to be combined only when needed, such as if a COVID-positive visitor is identified, and automatically deleted in four weeks.

Analytical summary

At the outset of the pandemic, the government presented the contact tracing technologies by proposing them as necessary tools to protect the right to security. When the outbreak was in a marginalized religious group, the religious group started problematizing contact tracing technologies by positing that these tools violate individual right to privacy, and subsequent stigmatization further infringes on the freedom of religion. The religious group purposefully subverted the use of contact tracing technologies, for example, by hiding their location. As a result, the government-proposed value of contact tracing lost its meaning. Throughout the negotiation, the priorities among the right to security and the right to privacy were re-balance. The government and the public reached a provisional agreement that the degree of information disclosure should be limited to better protect the right to privacy. Such understanding changed the design of the technology (i.e., information disclosure).

In the second stage, concerns over user noncompliance with the self-quarantine safety protection app (e.g., leaving the mobile phone at home) led to the introduction of electronic bracelets that were to be worn constantly on the wrist by all quarantining individuals. The government drew the social boundary around the app paired with the electronic bracelets to anyone in quarantine.

However, the electric bracelet’s physical and functional resemblance to existing surveillance technology for criminals raised contestation. Specifically, the public discourse problematized the design choice of the new tool claiming that it treats the quarantining individuals as criminals,

violating the freedom from arbitrary detention. Moreover, drawing broad social boundaries around the electronic bracelets that are worn constantly on the wrist, led people to perceive this tool as excessive surveillance, that only seeks administrative expediency, given that the quarantine violators were less than 1% of quarantining individuals. The government-proposed societal value of protecting the right to security of the population was undermined due to the new meaning proposed by the public. Through the contestation process, the government and the public reprioritized the societal values, reaching a provisional agreement on a meaning that the freedom of arbitrary detention should not be violated in the pursuit of administrative expediency, which is not a part of societal values in the UDHR framework. Admitting that a design choice of the electronic bracelet has a surveillance nature, the government narrowed a social boundary around the electronic bracelet by applying it to individuals who are highly likely to pose a threat to public health: quarantine rule violators and not to everyone in quarantine. The authorities also redesigned the app and electronic bracelets. Specifically, the app was modified to better identify rule violators, whereas a function that might infringe on civil liberties was removed from the electronic bracelets. By explicating the condition under which specific values are to be sacrificed, differentiation emerged between quarantining individuals and the rule violators.

In the third stage, contestation re-emerged when LGBTQ groups problematized that the contract tracing process violated the right to privacy and refused to participate in the process due to the fear of forced outing and stigmatization. The priorities among societal values were subjected to negotiation because protecting the right to security became unlikely due to the concern about the right to privacy. In response, the authorities rebalanced the degree to which information is exposed to the public by modifying the design of technologies in a way that better protects the right to privacy

(e.g., anonymous testing, information sharing). However, the tension re-emerged when the

authorities announced the plan to introduce the QR-code check-in system. In response, the public discourse problematizes the social boundary of the system claiming that it violates the right to privacy of healthy individuals by collecting personal information from all people visiting venues.

During the contestation process, the public and the government reached a provisional agreement that data collection through a QR-code system may violate the right to privacy, and thus, should be limited to the conditions that may pose a threat to public health. As a result, the government re-drew a social boundary by announcing that the system would be installed only in high-risk facilities.

Moreover, the design of the system was changed by adding new attributes that restrict data collection only during the outbreak, to further limit the data collection from suspected infectees. Overall, the negotiation reified the distinction between the suspected infectees and the healthy individuals.

Singapore

Starting point: A soft introduction of contact tracing (January - February 2020)

Singapore’s initial success in handling the pandemic is attributed to the government's contact tracing as well as the quick imposition of border controls (Vaswani 2020). Shortly after the first case was confirmed in Jan 2020, a multi ministry task force was formed to devise and implement a contact tracing protocol. Contact tracers drew on data from multiple sources to identify the persons exposed to confirmed cases, including interviews, surveillance cameras, digital signatures of activities at

ATMs, and credit card transactions. In addition to contact tracers in the Ministry of Health (MOH), dedicated contact tracing teams at hospitals, in the Police Force, and the Armed Forces aided contact tracing. Individuals who tested positive were isolated and required by law to assist the officials in mapping out their movements.

Stage 1: Contestation emerges over contact tracing technologies (March 2020)

The government reported that its manual contact tracing efforts noted above were hitting at best 40 to 60% and were imprecise, emphasizing the need for technological solutions to boost efficiency

(GovTech 2020c). The Government Technology Agency (GovTech), the in-house IT agency of the government, partnered with MOH to launch an app called TraceTogether (ibid). When

TraceTogether is installed on the phone, it uses short-distance Bluetooth signals to scan nearby phones where the app is installed. When the phones detect each other, they exchange the encrypted proximity data of individuals who have been within two meters of a patient for at least 30 minutes.

As long as a person is not infected, all encrypted data is stored locally on their phone, and data older than 21 days will be automatically deleted. They declared that data should be shared with central authorities only after an individual tested positive and that those refusing to share data could be charged under the law (Baharudin 2020).

The government envisioned that the population would use the app voluntarily, and once 75% of the population adopted it, efficient contact tracing would be achieved (Sabbagh and Hern 2020).

Now, the challenge was gaining citizen’s acceptance of the novel app. The government wanted to signal that the app is designed to protect the public’s right to security. They acted upon it in several directions, including placing the app under the medical category in Google and Apple’s app stores.

Their narratives framed the continuity with existing practices led by the public health authority while stating distinctive goals of enhanced efficiency of the new app: “the app is meant to complement current contact-tracing methods and allow for the identification of people who were in close proximity with an infected person more efficiently” (Baharudin 2020).

Tensions between societal values. The public referred to the app as surveillance technology that infringes on their rights to privacy. Citizens stated that they resist being spied by their government on their whereabouts (Roxanne 2020b). Contextual factors contributed to perceiving the contact

tracing app as surveillance technologies and to the public’s immediate contestation. The government called on police officers and soldiers to help with contact tracing due to their investigative expertise

(Mahmud 2020). The media headline – “Like an invisible criminal: How police helped find the missing link between COVID-19 church clusters in a day” (Mahmud 2020) – shows that the infection is described as a criminal who creates victim and culprit. The public not only contested with words but also refused the envisioned voluntary participation in contact tracing:

“some people in civil society and the journalism industry (myself included) are uncomfortable and reluctant to download TraceTogether. It’s a skepticism that’s grown out of either personal encounters or knowledge of other people’s encounters with state actors (Singaporean or otherwise), as well as an awareness of the sensitivity of the work that we do, and an unwillingness to take risks (or more risks) when it comes to surveillance and privacy” (Han 2020b) In addition, the design choices the government made with the contact tracing app were experienced as problematic. The most critical issue was that the app drained the battery quickly because the app was designed to use Bluetooth and run in the foreground (Citizen 2020). Users experienced that they could hardly use their phones for any other purposes. Other concerns were raised around security issues in case the user’s data was hacked as well as false positives that may incorrectly place a quarantine on citizens.

Government’s focus on narrative production without addressing issues. Responding to public concerns, the government argued that it has chosen technologies for contract tracing that addressed the public’s concerns. To distinguish between contact tracing technologies and surveillance technologies, the authorities referred to Bluetooth, which does not track people’s whereabouts, as a privacy-preserving feature offering privacy safeguards (GovTech 2020a). The government added that the human-in-the-loop (associated with traditional contact tracing) is important as human experts can correct false positives resulting from the app (Bay 2020). However, the public challenged the government’s narratives arguing that Bluetooth data, which traces people’s networks, still have

data that should be private and that the human-in-the-loop narratives only clarified the fact that the authorities are behind the technology:

“But everyone has different circumstances and risk assessments: for some, getting their networks traced is uncomfortable at best and dangerous at worst. With some of Singapore’s earliest COVID-19 positive cases, it was (falsely) rumored that the infected individuals were either sex workers, or had visited sex workers. Even when false, these speculations are damaging; when true, this “outing” of sex workers compromises their safety, and exposes them to violence” (Han 2020b). The contestation process on the meaning of contact tracing technologies caused ambiguity and deterred voluntary adopters. In addition, the design of the app causing the battery drain issue was not addressed and became a critical factor hindering the adoption. The adoption rate was far below

75%, which meant the contact tracing could not work as effectively as envisioned by the government

(Sabbagh and Hern 2020).

Stage 2: The tension intensified when the government introduced new technologies (April -

June 2020)

In early April, when the number of cases began to soar, more than a dozen migrant workers’ dormitories were placed under quarantine (Sim 2020b). However, quarantine was impossible in a

12-20 person room. The risks of infection are exacerbated by poor nutrition and limited access to both healthcare and personal protective equipment. This led to a five-fold increase in the number of patients in two weeks. Human rights groups and medical experts had warned of the possible mass infection in the dormitory. However, authorities had prepared for the epidemic by focusing only on the citizens (Geddie 2020). As the situation got worse, the authorities imposed a police-enforced

“circuit breaker” (lockdown) until May 4th, 2020. All non-essential workplaces and schools closed, while essential workplaces remained open.

As untraced transmission continued, the government decided to extend the circuit breaker

(lockdown) to June 1st, 2020. The extension of the lockdown led citizens to raise economic concerns

stating: “if you don't die of the virus, you'll die of economic stagnation” (Yong 2020). In turn, the government pointed out that contact tracing technologies are the necessary tools to get out of the circuit breaker and restart the economic activities. Prime Minister in Singapore stressed how public safety is both about health and livelihood:

“Some have characterised the choices we had to make as a trade-off between 'protecting lives' and 'protecting livelihoods...But this is a false dichotomy. If we do not take strong measures to contain the virus now, the situation can easily escalate and the economic disruption would be much more severe. (Tan 2020)” Drawing social boundaries and creating new technologies. Using this new discourse, the government then designed new contact tracing technologies. The government designed SafeEntry to collect the logs of location data by requiring visitors to all businesses to scan a QR-code (through the SafeEntry app or SingPass mobile app or their ID) when they enter and exit a venue (Yi 2020).

Singapore mandated the installation of SafeEntry in 200,000 venues as well as taxi and ride-sharing services. The authorities’ intention to signal that contact tracing technologies protect the economic rights also manifested in their categorization strategy. Unlike the TraceTogether app, classified as a medical category, the SafeEntry app was categorized into the productivity, business, or utility category in the Google and Apple’s app stores.

In addition, the government fragmented contact tracing, creating a sub-category of technologies that tightly monitor the migrant workers, work permits, and S-pass holders (migrant workers have limited rights in the Singaporean society). Specifically, they developed and mandated the use of SGWorkPass (the check-in app in dormitories) and FWMOMCare (symptom checking app) (Wei 2020). A worker who has received approval to resume work and leave the dormitory will see a green AccessCode on his SGWorkPass app. Similar to SafeEntry, these apps are placed under the “productivity” category. The authorities also mandated the use of TraceTogether, making registration on the app necessary criteria that migrant workers must meet on SGWorkPass. To this

group, the meaning of contact tracing was undoubtedly surveillance that infringes on the right to privacy and freedom of movement, and more broadly, the right to equality3.

Intensified tension triggered by new devices. The government designed a new contact tracing technology, a device called TraceTogether token. The stated logic of the authorities was that it is a self-powered device that can perform the same function as the TraceTogether app without the battery drain challenge (Aldgra 2020). The contesters’ antagonism toward contact tracing technologies soared when the government announced this plan. The decision to introduce a device that should be physically carried by users at all times sparked public resistance. The public used various analogies

(e.g., dog tag, prisoner, tagging every citizen) to frame this physical wearable device as an intrusive tracking tool that violates civil liberties. Phrases like “surveillance state” were thrown out, fearing the government scaling the token’s infrastructure to track all its citizen’s movements. An online petition, headlined "Singapore says 'No' to wearable devices for COVID-19 contact tracing," got more than 50,000 signatures (Ong 2020). The public further argued against the fact that the government did not enact legislation to limit the data used only for contact tracing effort and thus data can be used for other purposes. Moreover, people claimed that manufacturing wearable devices was wasting money, this way going against the government’s discourse that contact tracing technologies could help restart the economy. In response, the government framed the physical form of the device as a solution to protect elderly citizens by bridging digital divides. The authorities responded that privacy concerns are mistaken because the token does not track location, but rather it reduces the threat of hacking, as it has neither WiFi nor GPS hardware within it (Yu 2020b). The government, however, did not promise to introduce a bill to limit the use of TraceTogether data.

3 Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Although the key issue revolved around the right to privacy from the authorities, the authorities kept dismissing the core concerns, focusing on the technical issues that the new device could solve (e.g., security from hackers and battery drain). They relied primarily on discursive action to justify the use of the TraceTogether token, rather than modifying technology addressing core issues. The government kept emphasizing that it is not a location-based device intended to restrict freedom of movement, claiming that it is “not a tracking device” (GovTech 2020b). However, the public expressed distrust and stressed that “the government sugar coating the device daily” (Aldgra

2020). This resulted in resisting the adoption of this device.

To reduce the public resistance, the authorities distributed the initial batch of the

TraceTogether token to the elderly population suggesting voluntary use. However, the government still kept the possibility of distributing devices to all citizens open (Yu 2020b). Overall, throughout the second stage of the contestation process, the meaning of contact tracing technology became split and there was no agreement.

Stage 3: Government bundles the technologies and mandate the use (July- September 2020)

Disagreements on actions and narratives. The pandemic was gradually getting under control.

However, the number of migrant workers who were allowed to exit the dormitory was low because clearing of COVID-19 in the dormitory continued until August. As a result, workers were feeling trapped and suffered from mental problems. The outcome was repeated suicidal attempts by migrant workers. (Rebecca 2020). However, the government further created technologies for migrant workers that significantly infringed on their right to privacy. To monitor the quarantine order of incoming migrant workers, the government designed and issued smartwatches using GPS and 4G technology for tracking the wearer's specific location.

For the public, the authorities maintained the narrative that the technologies are not surveillance ones but simultaneously intensified the level of intrusion of the technologies. They modified the data management plan and updated the app to collect personal information (e.g., national identification numbers, passport numbers for the visitor), contradicting their initial promise that nothing more than mobile numbers will be required by the app (Tham 2020b). The inconsistency between the government narratives vs. government’s actions eroded the public’s trust and reinforced the belief that Singapore is becoming a surveillance state.

“Their starting is always like that, i.e. no hidden motives, no GPS, no tracking of movement, no mandatory, etc. etc. This to gain the people’s acceptance. BUT slowly, gradually, all the said items will be added to the “dog tags.”... in future if you do not wear “dog tags'' you cannot enter supermarkets, etc. etc. But I think a new law will be coming (not now, but in near future) for the “dog tags'' (Aldgra 2020).” The inconsistent approach of the authorities using different tools to monitor the general public and migrant workers also raised public suspicion. Some people suggested that migrant workers are “test beds” or “trial runs,” and thus, the government will soon mandate these technologies to everyone

(Roxanne 2020a). As one citizen commented on an online news article:

“The new update for the TraceTogether app requires users to re-register with their National Registration Identity Card number (more personal data than was previously required). The government claimed that the adoption of the app is not mandatory. But it is mandatory for migrant workers. It seems to also have been made a requirement for staff and students at the National University of Singapore. It follows as a natural next step, that the rest of us will soon have to carry some sort of tracing device too” (Han 2020a) Once the borders were reopened, the authorities enforced the use of wearable devices for incoming travelers to monitor their quarantines, including a newly designed wristband and gateway device that must be plugged into a power socket at the residence (Zhuo 2020). These devices used Bluetooth signals to each other and alerted the authorities if the distance gets too large. These tools tightly controlled incoming travelers’ movements and any attempt to take them off could be identified and punished.

Marginalized usage and perceived utility of the TraceTogether app. The public could not see the logic of adopting the TraceTogether to the whole population. The pandemic infections were continuing to grow only in migrant workers’ communities that were actually tightly controlled with monitoring tools. Hence, claims were made in the press that there was no need to use the app and that existing tools already work well for the citizens (Sim 2020a).

Moreover, since launching SafeEntry, the role of TraceTogether was further marginalized by describing that it “plugs the public transport gap” between venues (Tham 2020a). The public did use SafeEntry, as it did not track each individual’s movement all day long. The public, therefore, questioned why they should use TraceTogether when SafeEntry already works well. They also noted that TraceTogether’s lack of success stories made it difficult to trust its claimed efficiency. The government itself also admitted that it is too early to determine whether TraceTogether helps contact tracing as the adoption rate is too low to be effective (Hwa 2020). As a result, despite the fact that the government updated the app to address the battery drain issue, the adoption rate of the

Tracetogether app was still low.

The government bundled technologies and enforced their use. The government was not willing to give up on boosting the adoption of the TraceTogether app, which remained far below the governmental original efficiency goal. They bundled the TraceTogether app with SafeEntry, which achieved widespread adoption (Lai 2020). In addition, a new plan was announced to distribute the

TraceTogether tokens to more citizens. The plan mandates all citizens to check-in at certain venues using the TraceTogether token or app. The app users can scan the QR-code with their mobile phones and those who use the tokens will have to get venue staff to scan the QR-code on their tokens.

Currently, the government has continued to work on boosting enrollment, while the public continues to contest.

Analytical Summary

In the first stage, the authorities developed the TraceTogether app, envisioning its voluntary adoption.

The government presented the app by proposing that the app is designed to protect the right to security of citizens. However, public discourse problematized the design of an app by positing that it infringes on the public’s right to privacy, and furthermore, false positives results, which incorrectly places quarantine order, may infringe on the freedom of movement of healthy individuals. After the public interacted with the app, they also discovered that it took over their mobile resource too much

(battery draining). Thus, public discourse problematized the design of the app positing that the app violates the individual right to property. Discursive action between the government and the public continued with the production of competing narratives without reaching a provisional agreement on the priorities in the societal values. Battery draining issues were unresolved through the modification of technologies’ design choice. As a result, the adoption of the TraceTogether app was low, making it difficult to achieve the government’s goal of protecting the right to security.

At the second stage, as the pandemic cases increased due to mass infection in migrant workers’ dormitory, the government announced a circuit breaker, a “lockdown.” The economic concern grew during the circuit breaker and the government’s narratives began to associate contact tracing technologies with a new societal value by positing that contact tracing technologies protect the economic rights 4 and the freedom of movement. With this new narrative, a set of new technologies were introduced including (1) location tracking apps for migrant workers (e.g.,

FWMOMCare, SGWorkPass) and (2) spatial check-in technology for the general public (e.g.

SafeEntry). Although these technologies had the potential to violate human rights (e.g., the right to privacy and the right to equality and freedom of movement of migrant workers), these technologies

4 Article 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

were well adopted because (1) the narrative accommodating multiple values gained support from the public and (2) migrant workers did not have equal status as the citizens in the Singaporean society.

However, the tension between the values re-emerged when the government designed a new wearable device, the TraceTogether token. The growing concerns were manifested through an explosive narrative positing that the token violates the right to privacy. While the government kept dismissing the public’s key concerns around the right to privacy, it responded with discursive strategies by relating other societal values to the token including (1) the technical merits of the new technology design (no battery drain issues) that protects the public’s right to property5 (2) technical advantage of a wearable design that prevents hacking (protecting the right to privacy from hackers), and (3) the possibility of protecting the right to equality of vulnerable populations (e.g., elderlies). The public perceived these narratives as deceiving. To reduce the public resistance, the authorities drew a more narrow social boundary around the TraceTogether token and distributed its initial batch only to the COVID-19-vulnerable populations to be used voluntarily. The government also demarcated a new social boundary for the TraceTogether app and several other intrusive contract tracing technologies by mandating their use for migrant workers. As a result, the contact tracing measures were implemented based on one’s individual traits (e.g., age, nationality) violating the right to equality.

In the third stage, the chasm between the stance of the government and the public grew deeper without reaching even provisional agreement on the priorities in societal values. Despite the public’s concern that the government used the pandemic as an opportunity to engage in mass surveillance, the government did not enact a law restricting the use of TraceTogether and SafeEntry data only for COVID-19 contact tracing purposes. Rather, the government (1) updated the design of

5 Article 17: (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property

the app to collect more personal data, contradicting their initial promises, and (2) developed more intrusive technologies. The divergence between the government’s actions and its discourse led the public to doubt the government’s intentions. The public reported feeling that the government is

“sugar-coating” surveillance technologies in a way that would look less intrusive. The public also questioned the utility of TraceTogether, undermining the government’s meaning that technologies protect the right to security. As a result, even after modifying the app design to address the battery drain issue, its adoption rate was still low. The different measures applied to the vulnerable population and migrant workers led to the public suspicion that these populations are “test beds” or

“trial runs,” and thus, the government will soon enlarge the social boundaries around the

TraceTogether, by mandating it to everyone. Indeed, the government devised a new plan of bundling

SafeEntry with the TraceTogether system, mandating its use for all the citizens, thereby doing exactly what the public feared it would do. This also contradicts the initial promise that the government will not collect location data through the TraceTogether.

DISCUSSION

In this paper, we conceptualize how the government and the public are contesting the design, implementation, and use of new technologies pertaining to societal resilience. We show how each society struggled to find its own provisional agreement amongst contradictory societal values. Our study illustrates how the contestation process is carried out through the government making specific design choices for contact tracing technologies and drawing social boundaries around their intended use as well as through the public adopting or resisting these technologies. The process is shaped by the public discourse where the battle over the meaning of these technologies gets narrated.

Our analysis revealed that both countries encountered tensions between societal values when developing digitally-enabled contact tracing. These tensions got reflected in the design (e.g.,

Bluetooth app), implementation (e.g., drawing social boundaries), and use of contact tracing technologies (e.g., wearing an electronic bracelet) as well as through the public discourse surrounding them. The government designed these technologies and defined intended social boundaries around their implementation. It also shaped public discourse by proposing a narrative with a particular meaning for these technologies. The public, however, responded to governments’ action through its use of the technology (e.g, using faithfully or subverting) as well as by shaping an alternative narrative about the meaning of these technologies. In various phases of the contestation process, the governments and the public strove to achieve provisional agreements on the meanings of these technologies. For example, changes in technology design (e.g., anonymous testing) and use

(e.g., restricting information disclosure) altered the meanings of these technologies and enabled a shift in social boundaries (e.g., only the suspected infectees are subject to geolocation tracing). Every time the society reached a provisional agreement on these elements, a new meaning of the contact tracing technologies got enacted, preserving some societal values while compromising others. In this way, the contestation over the meaning of new technologies for dealing with a critical threat became the contestation over the meaning of societal resilience itself.

Although the trans-national value system played in the formation of narratives, the contestation process unfolded differently in Korea and Singapore. In Korea, when the values were in conflict, the government and the public participated in the contestation process and reached a provisional agreement on the meanings, design, and use of technologies, and social boundaries around the technologies. In contrast, in Singapore, when the tension arose between societal values associated with the TraceTogether system, the government and the public did not reach a provisional agreement on the meanings and design of technologies through the contestation process. When the contestation started by the public, the government relied primarily on a discursive strategy, which

(1) challenged the public’s narrative or (2) drew on alternative societal values (e.g., economic rights, right to equality of vulnerable populations, etc.) to promote the technologies. At the same time, the government diverged its action from the discourse by modifying the technology design in a way that further violated individual human rights. Although some changes were made to the technologies, such changes did not address the key public concern. This observation shows that relying solely on discourse to shape the meaning was not enough for finding a mutually acceptable balance. To achieve social resilience while preserving values beyond public safety requires a changer that is based not only on discourse, but also on the design, implementation, and use of technology.

Our findings illustrate that the contestation process is also shaped by the distribution of power between the government and the public and by diverse social structures. For example,

Singapore has a two-layer society with migrants having limited rights as compared to citizens, while

South Korea has a more uniform society consisting predominantly of citizens. Singapore and South

Korea also have different levels of government’s willingness to hear their citizens’ voices and provide accountability for their actions. South Korea strives to uphold democratic values and accepts opposition, contestation as part of the democratic process. Moreover, the social groups that showed high COVID-19 infection rates at the time of our study had different social statuses in the Korean versus Singaporean societies. South Korea’s LGBT community and religious groups are guaranteed equal rights in Korean society, while migrant workers in Singapore are not. As a result, the

Singaporean government created fragmented measures based on individual attributes (e.g., age, nationality) rather than based on the discussion on the cause of the threat, further undermining the civil rights of some of its members.

CONCLUSION

Our paper unpacks how societies strive to achieve societal resilience with technology by addressing conflicting values encoded in the UDHR. We show how the contestation process over conflicting values unfolds not only through the public discourse about these technologies, but also through government and public actions involved in their design, implementation, and use. In order to address tensions that arise, the government modifies the design of the existing and creates new technologies as well as draws social boundaries around their implementation. The public responds by adopting or resisting the use of technologies proposed by the government. Like the government, the public also engages in shaping the narrative about the meaning of these technologies. Moreover, as a result of the contestation process, fragmentation may arise where different groups have different uses of these technologies, enacting a different balance between conflicting societal values. This unequal use gives rise to a new set of conflicts associated with the infringement of civil rights of certain groups.

Overall, the UDHR framework allows researchers to systematically analyze tensions arising from contesting values as societies strive to achieve societal resilience with the help of new technologies.

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