What is State of Exception

In the context of SARS-CoV-2 health emergency, strongly framed in the normalization of logic of risk, the authors analyze three digital platforms of contagion containment and population tracking in order to investigate, through a comparative-descriptive analysis, the relationship between different socio-political-cultural contexts and the respective responses adopted—the Chinese government tool Health Code, the South Korean app Corona100, and the Italian app, Immuni—to counter a single global emergency. The objective is to investigate the framing operations that introduced on a global scale the use of apps in bio-security and immunity regime for which individual privacy increasingly collides with collective security. The authors consider central the opening of a debate on how the logic of risk and worst case scenario are paradigmatic nowadays in the development of increasingly sophisticated systems, potentially invasive of privacy, even in function of complex threats interconnected on a global scale.