Automating COVID responses: The impact of automated decision-making on the COVID-19 pandemic Tracing The Tracers 2021 report

In an unprecedented global social experiment in health surveillance, a plethora of automated decisionmaking (ADM) systems — including systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) — were deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were supposed to tackle fundamental public health issues. Nonetheless, too often, they were adopted with almost no transparency, no evidence of their efficacy, no adequate safeguards, and insufficient democratic debate. This report is the result of yearlong monitoring of the rollout and use of such systems, documented in our Tracing The Tracers project. In this final report, we will provide an early overall assessment of the main trends and developments concerning ADM-based responses to COVID-19.