Surveillance Creep in Times of Crisis: The Alipay Health Code and Implications for Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Social Control

Abstract

Covid-19. To obtain the code, users must complete a health declaration questionnaire through the Alipay app, sharing details about their travel history, current health condition, and potential exposure to the Abstract: This paper illustrates the ways in which governments can infringe upon civil liberties and expand surveillance measures in response to a crisis, through employing technological determinism as a vehicle to examine the Alipay Health Code system. The system was developed by Alipay and introduced in China in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 crisis to help monitor and control the spread of the virus, but was heavily criticized on social media by many Chinese people and was eventually scrapped in December 2022. It argues that surveillance technologies are inherently deterministic as they shape societal structures and power dynamics, often reinforcing existing hierarchies and inequalities. While social constructivism could be employed to analyze surveillance technologies, many stakeholders are not able to actively participate in shaping the discourse, utilization, and governance of these technologies due to limited access to information and power differentials, and the technological “black box” makes it challenging for citizens to fully understand and influence the decision-making processes and algorithms that govern their lives. It further argues that it is inevitable that the government will use another crisis to implement a surveillance system that expands its monitoring capabilities and further encroaches on individual privacy in the future. As a society, we must decide how to balance the need for public safety with the protection of civil liberties, ensuring transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in shaping the deployment and governance of such systems so that the deterministic nature of these technologies is tempered by ethical considerations and safeguards to prevent abuses of power.