A few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Research Council of Norway announced an urgent call for COVID-19 research. The call resulted in 48 projects, of which one was The Smartphone Pandemic: Mobile technologies and data in the COVID-19 response. As the projects were coming to an end in 2022, the Research Council invited everyone to a closing conference on September 8, 2022, to present their results, reflect on the significance of research in times of crisis and discuss lessons learned for the future.
The Smartphone Pandemic team at Centre for Development and the Environment, Katerini Storeng and Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée, presented the project's main research results via the poster below. The poster presents key data on digital contact tracing and smartphone mobility data and highlights three main take-aways from the project:
1. Experimentation: Smartphone-based technologies were adopted by public health authorities based on experimentation and limited theoretical evidence. This highlights the need for rigorous evaluation of effectiveness and discussion of political consequences.
2. Partnerships: The new forms of partnerships that emerged between ‘Big Tech’ and telecoms corporations and public health authorities, shows the need for transparency and regulation.
3. Market interests: Mobility data was monetized, e.g., for traffic control, public security and epidemic forecasting, which solidified the market dominance of Big Tech companies and normalized their role in the highly profitable health market. This draws attention to the urgent need for scrutiny of private sector incursion in healthcare and health data markets.
More information about the conference and a recording can be found here (in Norwegian): COVID-19: Research in the Wake of Pandemic (forskningsradet.no)
