Government IT and public service ethics

**This article is written by Bianca Wylie, Co-founder, Tech Reset Canada & Digital Public. **

• The problem: Covid apps need to be wound down and sunset
• Why it matters: To be trusted, public technology needs to be properly maintained and supported by good government communications. This includes shutting tech down when it’s not fit for purpose.
• The solution: Define public policy and process to shut these apps down and follow it to completion.

The way the public service has been used, and underused, during the pandemic in nations around the world is about more than partisan politics and privatization. There is a persistent and enduring myth that technology moves too fast for governments to keep up with. This is untrue and enables ahistorical thinking. If there is any public institution adequately funded and staffed to keep up with technology as a sector, it’s the government.

I have both followed and engaged directly with the interactions between governments, technology companies, and consulting companies for a while now. The relationship between and amongst them reflects a different kind of public power problem than corporate capture, though corporate capture is certainly part of it. The relationship is also one of acquiescence. Capture seems incomplete because, in order to be captured, one would have to believe that governments had some desire or intent to democratically use their power to guide the path of technology in society. History says there is no such interest. See Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology, for more on this.

If you follow the investments - the line items in government budgets – it will come as no surprise that most governments aren’t interested in being hands-on creators of technologies. They are happy to hand public power and money over to private interests in this realm. They do this in the name of the economy, to evade liability and accountability, (in concept - this is untrue in practice), and to receive the cultural and media shine that still comes with the announcement of doing “modern” things.

The larger issue here is how governments continue to legitimize products and systems that are at odds with the protection and expansion of accountable government.

Canada’s COVID Alert app provides a profound example of how these forces all come together to influence how technology is used in society in a range of public sectors. We would be wise to name and understand the power – power that manifests as unearned policy influence, as well as legitimacy -- that gets transferred to the parties involved in these intersections, Apple and Google amongst them.

During this pandemic, many nations around the world engaged their citizens in widespread technology experimentation through the use of a slew of apps. Canada’s COVID Alert app is one of many. This occurred despite a range of voices outlining the broad shapes of problems that had been unleashed by this experimentation in the past. This overview of digital response to crises by Sean McDonald, published in 2020, provides an enduringly helpful way to think about this digital experimentation.

You can think about Canada’s COVID Alert app experiment optimistically as governments trying to do something helpful with tech in an emergency. You can also read it perhaps more pragmatically as seizing an opportunity to experiment when it’s hard for people to say no, done despite historical evidence of ineffectiveness and severe equity problems. You can think both. Whatever you think, author Naomi Klein’s idea of ‘disaster capitalism’ most certainly belongs in your consideration.

To that end, back to technology and speed and time. As I recently learned, Canada’s exposure notification app has been fundamentally broken for months now in Canada’s most populous provinces due to limited PCR testing capacity. To “work” the app requires that people upload a code provided to them once they’ve had a PCR test. For months now, people have been unable to access PCR testing because there is no capacity. Which means that people aren’t uploading their cases to the app. Which means the app is broken. There could not be a clearer signal that the experiment is over. Somehow, however, Health Canada is able to leave the app in circulation. There are no mentions of these limitations in the app. Does this not in some ways count as providing bad information to the public? A false sense of security in the app?

What’s fascinating, and troubling, about the time component of this problem is that when the app was launched media visibility was high. Now, months later, the scrutiny is gone. In this quiet a large public/private digital infrastructure, one tethered to Google and Apple’s protocol, remains at large. This is a frightening example of how easy it is for governments to build out unaccountable digital infrastructures. According to this case study, the hardest part for governments is the launch. The longer-term need to provide accountability, even once there is a negative outcome such as a broken app, fades. This matters, because over time and with accumulation, software impacts how government fundamentally operates.

The larger issue here is how governments continue to legitimize products and systems that are at odds with the protection and expansion of accountable government. Problems raised by the intersection of proprietary systems, intellectual property, and trade are festering without clear descriptions of harm not because the harms aren’t real, but because the people they harm have no accessible redress. Digital transformation is something that public service ethics would be wise to take on more formally. And fast.

This piece is based on an earlier post titled “Digital Rights, Government IT, and Public Service Ethics” published April 12, 2021