| خلاصه مقاله | Background: In response to the rapid spread of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in the world, governments have applied widespread Smartphone-based contact tracing apps to curb COVID-19 transmission. Contact tracing is a successful response as part of a containment strategy, but this strategy has some ethical problems and challenges that need to be addressed.
Objective: The purpose of the present study was to systematically review the ethics problems and challenges related to the adoption of mobile contact tracing solutions for fighting COVID-19 outbreak.
Material and methods: Electronic databases, including PubMed, ProQuest, Web of Science Scopus, and Google Scholar from December 01, 2019 to December 01, 2020 were systematically searched for find related published articles. In all electronic databases, these key words (in the title/abstract) were used: Contact tracing (and synonyms) or Smartphone (and synonyms), and COVID-19 (and synonyms), and ethic*(and synonyms). Eligibility criteria included interventional, observational, modelling, and case studies related to contact tracing in during COVID-19 outbreak that reported findings regarding at least one ethic challenges and published in English language at peer reviewed journals. The search results, data extraction and quality evaluation were accomplished by two reviewers independently and finally included studies were synthesized.
Results: Of 611 research articles generated from our initial search, 9 articles met inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Some of the primary ethical challenges of which are the spread of individual information paradox, unnecessary access to privacy information, causing panic among the societies and increase untruths to governments and healthcare systems.
Conclusion: Contact tracing is an important measure to attempt the curb transmission of COVID-19, but concerns over a breach in data privacy and another ethical problem have impact toward their adoption in societies. Also, improving the privacy policies by governments could be reassuring and addressed this challenges and ethical problems of these applications. |