Pandemic Citizenship by Design: The German Contact Tracing App as a Political Infrastructure

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, states around the world used smartphone apps to break chains of infection. Some functioned as a passport or enabled states to enforce certain rules on their citizens. Others, such as the German contact tracing app, were less intrusive, anonymously informing users about their high-risk encounters with an infected person. This article analyses how the German app configured state-citizen relations using infrastructure-building as a conceptual lens. Drawing on interviews with app developers, public health offices, and users, we show how the app’s technological setup instantiated norms and expectations about what it meant to be a good citizen during the pandemic. These instantiations of citizenship evolved as the app and its infrastructure became a constant source of friction. The public controversy around its digital architecture led to a fundamental modification of its design principles, which imbued them with a liberal conception of citizenship. This shift, however, caused a disconnect from manual contact tracing procedures by public health authorities and turned pandemic conduct into a mostly private affair. Because the app precluded sovereign governmental action against citizens, it made users responsible for prudent self-governance within an imagined community of vulnerable others without providing sufficient political, social, and technological support.