Mixed records of digital contact traces abroad pose problems for US efforts to curb COVID-19

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Tufts University Busker Chakra Volty

(Conversation) Two public health measures-tests to identify infected people, and contact tracking to identify anyone who may have been infected-are infected with COVID-19 in countries around the world. As the economy and new surges resumed, they became essential.

Despite increasing testing, contact tracing with a sufficiently wide net is still a daunting task. Contact tracking includes public health staff conducting interviews with infected people. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, public health professionals are looking for an additional 180,000 contact tracers, but the progress of contact tracing is not going well.

Enter a digital innovation that offers an appetizing promise to automate the tedious task of alerting virus-exposed people. Many governments advocate such apps as a way to enhance manual contact tracking. As economists tracking the use of digital technology around the world, the experience of these countries has shown that there is a challenge to getting enough people to use the app. Unfortunately, these challenges seem insurmountable in the United States.

Privacy and trust

The contact tracking app detects that the smartphone is in the presence of another app-enabled smartphone of the owner who has been tested positive for RSS-CoV-2.

There are two types of these apps. One mimics a traditional contact trace by uploading to a central public health server a smartphone ID number that is close to the infected person’s smartphone. Depending on the app, public health authorities can be notified of the smartphone owner’s ID.

Another option is the “exposure notification” app, which uses a random number to prioritize privacy and prevent anyone from knowing who you are. All data is stored on the user’s phone. Apple-Google collaboration supports these types of apps.

Initial success in countries such as South Korea fueled the initial enthusiasm for digital contact tracing. Some countries, such as India, had to do that. Others like Germany had to rethink their approach and change course.

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Experiences from South Korea, India and Germany suggest a test of three questions to assess the potential of such apps: does the government have public trust? It? Are citizens willing to “pay” for improved health by accepting the loss of privacy? Is there anything happening in the history of a country that helps people shift the balance in favor of their willingness to share data?

Korea: Widespread self-employment

South Korea was hit hard by COVID-19 from early on, but it has kept deaths low by introducing contact tracking technology along with extensive testing. The contact tracking weapon included CCTV footage, a tracking app combined with travel and medical records, and credit card transaction information.

Without a doubt, it has one of the most annoying digital assistance tracking systems everywhere. The system even shares the location of infected people with the media and issues urgent text alerts.

All of these were widely accepted, except when the intrusion crossed the line. The COVID-19 cluster, linked to gay clubs and bars, raised concerns about discrimination against the LGBTQ community when calling out to those who visited such facilities. The government has stopped selecting specific clubs and bars in the alert system.

Why did Koreans decide to tolerate this level of official intrusion? The description can be traced to the history of the country. The previous administration failed to respond to the 2015 MERS outbreak because it did not share information about hospitals visited by infected citizens. This has provided public support for a bill that gives health authorities access to CCTV and smartphone location data on infected citizens and gives them the right to issue alerts.

India: Partially required to be hired

In preparation for resumption after the lockdown, the Government of India has declared Aarogya Setu’s contact tracking app mandatory for office workers and in some cases forced by police. But then there was growing concern. The app had little privacy protection. Data was collected using both GPS and Bluetooth technology and stored on a central server where data protection laws are not enforced.

In response, the government switched the app from mandatory to “recommended” and provided enough loopholes for organizations to set individual permissions. In addition, the app has been uploaded to the public GitHub repository. This will, in principle, open the app (not the data it collected).

Ironically, Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoyed the overwhelming public support, even if the country endured the toughest blockades everywhere and suffered more than many could say. However, the app stored civic data on a centralized server, further raising concerns about digitally enabled state surveillance. The app was also co-created by a minister headed by Amit Shah, Modi’s aide who has a nasty history of power abuse. All of these made it difficult to recruit voluntarily.

Germany: hiring suspended

Germany had to stop and restart its digital contact tracking efforts. The government launched a contact tracking app based on a technology developed by the European Initiative. However, a very critical open letter from multiple experts caused the fear of national surveillance because the data was stored centrally, and Apple did not allow the iPhone operating system to work with it. .. As a result, the German government has abandoned the centralized model of an Apple-Google compliant decentralized alternative.

This U-turn was caused in particular by her administration’s handling of the coronavirus response, despite widespread trust in Angela Merkel. Again, history provides a guide. Germans have lived on two notorious surveillance regimes. Gestapo of the Nazi era and Stasi of the Cold War.

Even with a decentralized privacy protection approach, new German apps are unlikely to reach Korean adoption levels. However, the government’s investment in an effective traditional contact tracking approach that uses public health staff to investigate contacts makes digital alternatives less urgent.

Outlook for Digital Contact Tracking in the US

What do these cases say about the adoption of digital contact traces in the United States, which leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths?

Americans have less trust in the government than ever. With a series of revelations from Edward Snowden to Cambridge Analytica in recent years, citizens are worried about privacy breaches and misuse of data, with growing concern about governments and technology companies accessing their data.

There is also no consistent national plan to deploy such an app. The White House, federal agencies, and state governments have failed to defend them. This means that adoption rates are likely to be low and people don’t see enough value to use them and endanger their privacy. The app may appear in pockets of companies, college campuses, communities, etc. and creates a fragmented and unreliable system of digital contact traces.

In short, the United States remains nearly completely proven in its time-consuming and costly manual contact tracking. At present, only seven states and the District of Columbia have sufficient contact tracers. Compliance is another issue. Officials in Rockland County, New York have issued subpoenas to force people to cooperate in contact tracking.

Ironically, the United States may need digital contact tracing more than any other country, but it seems to turn its back on the life-saving innovation itself that helped develop it.

This article was republished from Conversation under the Creative Commons License. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/digital-contact-tracings-mixed-record-abroad-spells-trouble-for-us-efforts-to-rein-in-covid-19- 140414.