Apple & Google Announce A Coronavirus Tracking System; Benefits, Concerns

[appalachiablue]

Apple and Google Announced a Coronavirus Tracking System. How Worried Should We Be? A well-designed tool could offer public health benefit, but a poorly designed one could pose unnecessary and significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. Common Dreams, April 18, 2020.

Apple and Google last week announced a joint contact tracing effort that would use Bluetooth technology to help alert people who have been in close proximity to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Similar proposals have been put forward by an MIT-associated effort called PACT as well as by multiple European groups.

For there to be trust, the tool must protect privacy, be voluntary, and store data on an individual's device rather than in a centralized repository. These proposals differ from the traditional public health technique of "contact tracing" to try to stop the spread of a disease. In place of human interviewers, they would use location or proximity data generated by mobile phones to contact people who may have been exposed. While some of these systems could offer public health benefits, they may also cause significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. If such systems are to work, there must be widespread, free, and quick testing available. The systems must also be widely adopted, but that will not happen if people do not trust them. For there to be trust, the tool must protect privacy, be voluntary, and store data on an individual's device rather than in a centralized repository.

A well-designed tool would give people actionable medical information while also protecting privacy and giving users control, but a poorly designed one could pose unnecessary and significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. To help distinguish between the two, the ACLU is publishing a set of technology principles against which developers, the public, and policymakers can judge any contact tracing apps and protocols.

Technology principles that embed privacy by design are one important type of protection. There still need to be strict policies to mitigate against overreach and abuse. These policies, at a minimum, should include:
Voluntariness—Whenever possible, a person testing positive must consent to any data sharing by the app. The decision to use a tracking app should be voluntary and uncoerced. Installation, use, or reporting must not be a precondition for returning to work or school, for example.
Use Limitations—The data should not be used for purposes other than public health—not for advertising and especially not for any punitive or law enforcement purposes.
Minimization—Policies must be in place to ensure that only necessary information is collected and to prohibit any data sharing with anyone outside of the public health effort.
Data Destruction—Both the technology and related policies and procedures should ensure deletion of data when there is no longer a need to hold it.
Transparency—If the government obtains any data, it must be fully transparent about what data it is acquiring, from where, and how it is using that data.
No Mission Creep—Policies must be in place to ensure tracking does not outlive the effort against COVID-19.

These policies, at a minimum, must be in place to ensure that any tracking app will be effective and will accord with civil liberties and human rights...

More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/18/apple-and-google-announced-coronavirus-tracking-system-how-worried-should-we-be

[Igel]

1. A voluntary contact tracing tool.

It's like voluntary social distancing.


Taiwan and S. Korea succeeded not just because of what they did but because they could do it: There's a higher degree of social capital.

The US has largely spent down its capital.