Many governments have seen digital health technologies as promising tools to tackle the current COVID-19 pandemic. A much-talked example in this context involves the recent deluge of digital contact tracing apps (DCT) aimed at detecting Covid-19 exposure. In this short contribution we look at the bio-political justification of this phenomenon and reflect on whether DCT apps constitute, as it is often argued, a serious potential breach of our right to privacy. Despite praising efforts attempting to develop legal and ethical frameworks for DCT apps’ usage; we argue that such endeavours are not sufficient to tackle the more fundamental problem of mass surveillance, which will remain largely unaddressed unless we deal with the biopolitical arguments presented and resort to a technical and structural defence.

许多政府都将数字医疗技术视为应对当前 COVID-19 大流行的有前途的工具。在这方面，一个备受关注的例子是最近出现的大量旨在检测 Covid-19 暴露情况的数字接触者追踪应用程序 (DCT)。在这篇简短的文章中，我们探讨了这种现象的生物政治合理性，并反思 DCT 应用是否像人们经常争论的那样构成对我们隐私权的严重潜在侵犯。尽管赞扬尝试为 DCT 应用程序的使用制定法律和道德框架的努力；我们认为，此类努力不足以解决更根本的大规模监视问题，除非我们处理所提出的生命政治论点并诉诸技术和结构性防御，否则该问题在很大程度上仍得不到解决。