Regulating emerging technology in times of crisis: Digital contact tracing in Norway during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

In times of crisis, emerging technology can pose major challenges for regulators. They must deal with great uncertainty and urgency related to both the crisis and the technology. To understand such situations, this article studies the revelatory case of privacy regulation of a contact-tracing application called Smittestopp, created in Norway during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on public and organizational documents and 48 interviews, the analysis shows that the Norwegian Data Protection Authority faced several options for regulatory intervention throughout the crisis, and adapted its approach based on intra-crisis experience, regulatees' responses, and different levels of uncertainty and urgency. Building on these findings, the study formulates propositions regarding the regulation of emerging technology during a crisis and regulatory agencies' use of rule-based, ideabased, and norm-based interventions. This study provides insight into how these three types of intervention relate to different aspects of a crisis situation. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of idea-based intervention as a key site of analysis in studying technology that emerges during a crisis. | INTRODUCTIONResearch on crises has shown that technologies and innovations can emerge rapidly to overcome the crises in question (Mbunge et al., 2021;Meijer et al., 2019). At the same time, emerging technologies bring about uncertainty, both related to their technological specifics and their

Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications from Governance Capacity and Legitimacy

“…Scoring high on analytical capacity not only improve the likelihood of achieving goals, but also overall saving resources. Regulatory capacity deals with what type of regulations is used and how strict the regulatory measures are defined (Lund-Tønnesen, 2022 ). These are both crucial under a pandemic.…”

“…Norway is generally seen as a high performer in the pandemic (Christensen & Lægreid, 2020 ), but that does not mean that all aspects of dealing with the pandemic went smoothly and without difficulties. Decisions were made under great uncertainty, with limited time to act, and unclear consequences of the implemented measures (Lund-Tønnesen, 2022 ).…”

Digitalization of public sector organizations over time: The applicability of quantitative text analysis

“…Privacy concerns are a core feature of user feedback and responsiveness (Lember et al, 2018) and constitute a growing part of citizens' evaluations of new digital public services (Lund-Tønnesen, 2022). Privacy concerns are particularly relevant for the NCA because a great deal of its activities involve tracking who travels where, when, and with which goods.…”