The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that Faculty member Dr. Teresa Scassahas been awarded “Best Developments in the Field Article of 2021” by the Development in the Field Panel of the Cambridge University Press for her article “Pandemic Innovation: The Private Sector and the Development of Contact-Tracing and Exposure Notification Apps”.
The award recognizes the novelty of the topic and the usefulness of Dr. Scassa's analysis. The article drives home the message that the use of technology will continue to be a site of political debate. It is not neutral, but rather circumstantial and dependent on context. The selection committee especially appreciated the exploration of the (implicit) normative aspects built into this kind of monitoring, and how the potential for human rights abuse inherent in the society-wide collection of user location and health status data led to design choices that may have reduced the flexibility or even the effectiveness of the system by accommodating the legitimate concerns of the public over government intrusion into the right to privacy. At the same time, it was private instead of public actors who decided that privacy should prevail over public health monitoring.
This paper was supported by Scotiabank Fund for the AI & Society Initiative at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Teresa Scassa is the Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy, a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and a Full Professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa, with a cross-appointment to the School of Information Studies. Her research explores the intersection of law and technology, and she draws upon interdisciplinary approaches and networks in her work. She has written widely about intellectual property and privacy law issues in a broad range of contexts. Her ongoing research projects are on artificial intelligence and the law, data governance, data privacy, and legal dimensions of data scraping.
Congratulations to Dr. Scassa!