What is contact tracing, why are two rivals calling for a truce and who needs to know where we are all the time?
Go back to the dawn of 2020 and the notion of everyone downloading an app to track our encounters with other people would have been worrying if not absurd. Today, with cases of COVID-19 ballooning in the US, it’s becoming increasingly probable that this kind of surveillance will be a key component in restoring society to normalcy.
For decades, this technique has required painstaking drudgery — interviewing patients about their every move, calling airlines and managers of restaurants, examining hotel records — to determine everyone that’s been exposed. This was the case in tracking the paths of HIV, Ebola and measles. Right now, most of the US is under stay-at-home orders because we don’t know who has COVID-19 and who doesn’t; to be safe, we’re presuming that anybody could. In San Francisco and Massachusetts, local authorities are beefing up their contact-tracing capabilities, but for the most part, experts say, we’ve missed the boat on tracking the exact path of virus transmission for now.
Around now, alarm bells might start ringing. Consenting to this kind of global surveillance appears to fly in the face of everything we’ve learned about sound data hygiene. Trust in the technology industry was in decline before COVID-19. In a worst case scenario, privacy experts fear contact tracing could create the architecture for a more invasive surveillance state —and new norms that can’t be rolled back.
The location-based data initiatives we’ve seen in the US so far have relied on aggregated, anonymized location data — the kind you might rely on in everyday apps like Google Maps — released by companies like Facebook, Google and Foursquare. The CDC and regional governments have also reportedly been using this data to see trends of where people congregate. But this data doesn't give away individual locations.
Based on the details so far — more are still forthcoming — this is, for the most part, the system Apple and Google have thrown their weight behind. What version are you on?One issue not addressed in Google's announcement of the partnership is Android-version support. The company has long had a problem with Android-version fragmentation; because manufacturers each have their own quirks when it comes to customization and support, billions of Android devices, globally, run thousands of slightly different software configurations.
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