Surveillance Creep in Times of Crisis: The Alipay Health Code and Implications for Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Social Control
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
A new type of coronavirus disease, known as Covid-19, originated in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in late December 2019.This disease, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), resulted in severe pneumonia in some individuals.With its high infectivity and ability to spread between humans, Covid-19 quickly spread across China and eventually evolved into a global pandemic affecting countries worldwide.What accompanied the spread of the virus was a wave of panic.Starting from China, governments around the world tried to come up with various coping strategies, including but not limited to the development of vaccines, mass quarantine, restriction on traveling, city lockdown, and the implementation of large-scale surveillance.Among all these methods, the Alipay Health Code system has been able to achieve significant success in regulating people's movement and reducing the risk of contagions.This is a digital health tracking system created by Ant Financial Services Group, affiliated with Alibaba Group, as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic.It uses a color-coded QR code (red, yellow, or green) to indicate an individual's health status and their potential risk of spreading Covid-19.To obtain the code, users must complete a health declaration questionnaire through the Alipay app, sharing details about their travel history, current health condition, and potential exposure to the Abstract: This paper illustrates the ways in which governments can infringe upon civil liberties and expand surveillance measures in response to a crisis, through employing technological determinism as a vehicle to examine the Alipay Health Code system.The system was developed by Alipay and introduced in China in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 crisis to help monitor and control the spread of the virus, but was heavily criticized on social media by many Chinese people and was eventually scrapped in December 2022.It argues that surveillance technologies are inherently deterministic as they shape societal structures and power dynamics, often reinforcing existing hierarchies and inequalities.While social constructivism could be employed to analyze surveillance technologies, many stakeholders are not able to actively participate in shaping the discourse, utilization, and governance of these technologies due to limited access to information and power differentials, and the technological "black box" makes it challenging for citizens to fully understand and influence the decision-making processes and algorithms that govern their lives.It further argues that it is inevitable that the government will use another crisis to implement a surveillance system that expands its monitoring capabilities and further encroaches on individual privacy in the future.As a society, we must decide how to balance the need for public safety with the protection of civil liberties, ensuring transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in shaping the deployment and governance of such systems so that the deterministic nature of these technologies is tempered by ethical considerations and safeguards to prevent abuses of power.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,015 | 0,055 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,002 | 0,002 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,017 | 0,034 |
| Communication savante | 0,023 | 0,022 |
| Science ouverte | 0,002 | 0,013 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,015 | 0,020 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,014 | 0,001 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».