In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Governments are instituting mobile tracking technologies to perform rapid contact tracing. However, these technologies are only effective if the public is willing to use them, implying that their perceived public health benefits must outweigh personal concerns over privacy and security. The Australian federal government recently launched the ‘COVIDSafe’ app, designed to anonymously register nearby contacts. If a contact later identifies as infected with COVID-19, health department officials can rapidly followup with their registered contacts to stop the virus’ spread. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google’s Bluetooth exposure notification system) in two representative samples of the Australian public prior to the launch of COVIDSafe. We compared these attitudes to usage of the COVIDSafe app after its launch in a further two representative samples of the Australian public. Using Bayesian methods, we find widespread acceptance for all tracking technologies, however, observe a large intention-behaviour gap between people’s stated attitudes and actual uptake of the COVIDSafe app. We consider the policy implications of these results for Australia and the world at large.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are becoming central to the remaking of social work with children and families in England and Wales. Factors helping to steer this development include ‘joined up thinking’, the ‘e-government agenda’, and marketization. Examples of ‘e-practice’ discussed include: the envisaged databases for children, featured in the Children Act 2004; the utilization by local authorities of the ‘Risk of Offending Generic Solution’ (RYOGENS); the pending introduction of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS). The article seeks to promote debate and contributions from social work and social policy academics, users and providers of social services.

The nature of the COVID-19 pandemic may require governments to use privacy-encroaching technologies to help contain its spread. One technology involves co-location tracking through mobile Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth to permit health agencies to monitor people’s contact with each other, thereby triggering targeted social-distancing when a person turns out to be infected. The effectiveness of tracking relies on the willingness of the population to support such privacy encroaching measures. We report the results of two large surveys in the United Kingdom, conducted during the peak of the pandemic, that probe people’s attitudes towards various tracking technologies. The results show that by and large there is widespread acceptance for co-location tracking. Acceptance increases when the measures are explicitly time-limited and come with opt-out clauses or other assurances of privacy. Another possible future technology to control the pandemic involves “immunity passports”, which could be issued to people who carry antibodies for the COVID-19 virus, potentially implying that they are immune and therefore unable to spread the virus to other people. Immunity passports have been considered as a potential future step to manage the pandemic. We probe people’s attitudes towards immunity passports and find considerable support overall, although around 20% of the public strongly oppose passports.

Within social work education, there may be a failure to adequately and critically examine neoliberalism and processes of neoliberalization. In this context, those seeking to grasp the meaning of neoliberalism should be attentive to at least six interconnected components: how we might define neoliberalism in relation to the 'embedded liberalism' it endeavoured to supplant or displace; the role of the state within neoliberalism; the concept of 'accumulation by dispossession' which illuminates how neoliberalism has constantly aimed to redistribute in favour of the rich; the centrality of insecurity and precariousness; the renewed and retrogressive faith in incarceration and, more broadly, what has been termed the 'new punitiveness'; and how neoliberalism, in practice, is often at variance with the theory and rhetoric. It will be suggested that contemporary interpretations of neoliberalism by, for example, David Harvey and Pierre Bourdieu-along with the insights of Antonio Gramsci-might aid our understanding during a period of, now perhaps, faltering neoliberalization.

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