Privacy designs, technological sovereignty and digital pandemic response-ability
Niels van Dijk, Kjetil Rommetveit, Maciej Otmianowski · Journal of Responsible Innovation · 2026
This article tells the story of digital contact tracing in Norway and ensuing public controversies over encompassing surveillance. The resolution of the controversy came to turn predominantly on matters of privacy and measures provided through privacy-by-design. We relate this to recent turns towards design-based governance, which have also found their way into the field of Responsible Innovation. We contend that there is a need for Responsible Innovation scholarship and practice to pay closer scrutiny to institutional and political implications when governance issues become subject to design- and engineering-based approaches. In particular, debates about control over the digital infrastructures used to manage public health emergencies were reframed as matters of technological sovereignty, bringing to the fore what we call infrastructural response-ability. Finally, through a comparison with similar developments in France, we contrast this with a ‘distrust-by-design’ approach that sheds light on the broader politics around innovation.