Coronavirus: A Catalyst for the War between Technology and Privacy

By: Sheeri Bao & Sadaf Musfique

Posted: 23rd April 2020

COVID-19. A WHO labelled Pandemic. It is clearly unlike anything we’ve seen for the past over 15 years.
We are still currently in lock-down, and the current spread of daily cases only seems to be escalating.
However, how has technology been caught in the cross-fires?
Has it raised a solution in mitigating the risks, or simply raised even more concerns?

As of April 19th, there have been 2.33 million reported cases of the coronavirus, with 1.57 million cases still active. There have been over 700 000 reported cases in the United States, with only 64 840 patients officially recovering. This virus has not only affected the health and safety of individuals, but also the financial stability of countries on a macroeconomic and microeconomic level. With governments all across the world desperately searching for innovation that accelerates the slowdown of the coronavirus, public health officials say one of the most important things that has to happen is a long standing technique called contact tracing.

Contact tracing is a process used to understand how an infectious disease is spreading in a community. It involves identifying from whom a sick person caught the illness from, and to find out who they have been in contact with while they have been infectious. Originally, the technology used for contact tracing would involve manually tracing individuals with as much as a notepad and a telephone. With this pandemic essentially shutting the world down, there are efforts across the world to evolve the technology used for contact tracing, specifically with a tracking device that the majority of individuals already have – the smartphone.

The 1st place that smartphones played a role in tracking the coronavirus was the origin of the virus, China. Countries in Asia having been through the SARS epidemic were more tolerant and ready to take strong action at the outset. Part of China’s strategy to fight the coronavirus has relied heavily on data that most of the Western society isn’t willing to freely give up. For example, China would be able to order telecom companies to turn over information, and they can access information that Chinese companies have on their citizens. This would allow them to track and contact people who travelled through Wuhan in the early days of the virus. WSJ in Asia reported that China instructed an affiliate of Ali Baba group to produce an app that would give people a colour coded QR code. People were assigned these colour codes based on their risk level, with colours being green – safe, yellow – potential and red – infected. This strategy did slow down the spread of the virus but ultimately raised privacy concerns.

The success of China’s implementation of advanced contact tracing shifted privacy expectations towards this model. In the Czech Republic, government contracted call centres have started calling up people who have tested positive asking people whether the government can use their cell phone location histories to identify those who they have come in contact with. In Slovakia, the government has passed a law that allows its public health office to collect the geolocation data without permission.

Other European countries and a few Asian countries such as France, Germany and Singapore are working on apps that rely on its users to opt in to some level of tracking, such as reporting your symptoms to local health authorities.

The U.S has also shifted its approach to tracking apps, with MIT behind an effort called ‘safepath’, which is an app that will enable users to match the location data on their smartphones with anonymized, blurred location history of infected patients.

However, these apps are very limited in their ability to collect information due to two main reasons. First, they rely mostly on GPS data which is not very accurate and could lead to a lot of false positives. Second is due to the fragmentation from various apps. The plethora of different apps that are not interoperable makes the tracking process very inefficient. Consider a case where you have downloaded App A, and I have downloaded App B. If you were to come across me while using the app, and later eventually test positive to the virus, this information would not be transmitted to me, and hence the entire contact tracing process would be largely ineffective.

Enter, the most astounding partnership of the 21st Century: Google x Apple.

On April 10th, Apple and Google began their own digital “contact-tracing” system to help trace and contain the spread of COVID-19. According to Stat Counter, Between the 2 companies, they account for 99.3% of smartphones globally.

But how exactly does this work?

The tracking system is still in development, but essentially, there will be a phone downloadable app from a local public health authority. In the background, your phone will broadcast an ID Code that changes roughly every 15 minutes, and any other phone running that app is going to be broadcasting its own ID code. ID is broadcasted using bluetooth, and bluetooth signals can only connect that are within about 30 feet, and if 2 phones are near each other, for a given period of time, the phones will record each other’s ID codes which then get stored directly in each other’s phones. If one individual tests positive for the virus, they then report that onto the app on their phone and any other phone which has stored their data would receive a notification. However, it is also stated that all beacon keys are released, through consent, if you test positive for coronavirus, to a server. This is the first red flag. Nonetheless, the government can easily identify those that have been in contact with a Covid-19 patient and new clusters of infection, taking on effective measures.

Yet, for this to be truly effective, Apple and Google have claimed it would need around 50% of users to take it up, with Oxford University suggesting a minimum of 60% of the estimated 3 billion people worldwide owning an Apple or Android Smartphone needed.

This still leaves out billions of people who don’t have smartphones.

Further limitations include the technology used itself. Bluetooth may not be the most precise element that can capture physical interaction. What if a wall separates two individuals, yet the app records each of their data? This may lead to an overwhelming number of false positives, leading to 14 day quarantines for individuals, creating major inconveniences. Moreover, how can you make sure that 100% of these people report test results honestly?

This mass-adoption will be difficult from both a cultural and practical perspective. Smartphones are less accessible to lower-income people and seniors, the exact population that has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. They would have to download the app, install latest software updates, carry their phones everywhere, and want to participate in the first place. Perhaps, for certain demographics, the barrier to entry is simply too high.

This entire model relies on voluntary adoption. But, there is a certain trade-off between privacy and public health. The West is built around two core pillars – data should be anonymous and aggregated. However, the Australian Financial Review notes that “technology alone cannot effectively track down and identify people. (It) will require other tools and teams of public healthcare workers to track people in the physical world”. This is the case for South Korea and China which uses credit cards and public transit records and HongKong which uses electronic wristbands that track location. There seems to be suggestions that this level is needed for effectiveness. Singapore’s solution, the “TraceTogether App” only saw 12% of people downloading it as of April 1. Consequently, this is only a very small supplement intervention solution, with government officials needing “two-thirds of the population or more using it”.

It is clear this strategy is no “silver bullet” with Rhy Fenwick, the Communications Chief for the Covid-Watch group claiming “it doesn’t have to be a perfect system”. Instead, Fenwick raises it as a complement for other efforts, claiming “it just has to be better than the status quo.” Just as wearing masks: though many people still won’t use them or use them wrong, the use minimises the health-risk.

What perhaps is most interesting discussion, are the actions of Google, Apple and the Government once the pandemic is over. Apple have already stated that all of the data kept on your phone will be deleted once you have deleted the app, and have supported this with published codes. One could hope that the data given to the government recording interactions between phones would be deleted for the sake of the community’s privacy. In 1-2 years time, will we view these strategies as completely unique to the event of the pandemic, or will this push the agenda for private companies and the government to normalise data collection and stress its importance to society?

The ethical ambiguity surrounding the feud between technology and privacy has certainly been amplified during these times. And, it will only be more polarising in years to come.