Privacy may be the loser as governments count on tech in combat against coronavirus
05 April, 2020
In Europe, officials, doctors and engineers are considering how smartphones could possibly be enlisted in the war against the spread of the brand new coronavirus.
One apparent attraction for health officials may be the opportunity of using smartphones to find out with whom someone identified as having COVID-19 has been around contact.
But can this be achieved without intrusive surveillance and usage of our devices that store an abundance of private information?
Anonymised and aggregated
Firms can “anonymise” location data received from your own smartphone by stripping out personal identifiers. It could then be presented in an “aggregate” form where individual and identifiable data points aren't accessable.
Your location data has already been likely being used that way by mobile operators to feed traffic information to map apps.
Such data has already been being provided by mobile operators to governments all over the world.
Google, which collects large amounts of data from users of its myriad services, plans to publish info on the movement of people to allow governments to measure the effectiveness of physical distancing measures.
In particular, it will display percentage point increases and decreases in visits to such locations as parks, shops, and workplaces.
Bluetooth sleuth
Anonymised and aggregated only get you so far. To get practical data just like the persons with whom an infected person has had contact, it is advisable to get invasive. Or do you?
Singapore pioneered a method using Bluetooth.
If you’ve ever linked a pair to your phone in a public place you’ll probably have noticed the devices of others nearby.
It really is this feature of Bluetooth that the Singaporean software TraceTogether exploits.
Someone who has downloaded the iphone app and kept their Bluetooth enabled will begin to join up codes from all persons who have the iphone app on the phone and come within range.
Germany is looking at rolling out a similar system.
Privacy concerns
The Singaporean app was created to reduce privacy concerns.
For one, the software is voluntary.
Another is that it doesn’t track your location, rather it just collects codes from the phones of folks with whom you enter into relatively close contact.
That information is merely uploaded to the operator of the iphone app when a person declares himself or herself as having come down with COVID-19.
The TraceTogether software then matches up the codes (non-identifiable except to the operator of the system) with the telephone number of owners, and messages them that that they had been in contact with anyone who has been identified as having COVID-19.
‘Proportionate and temporary’-
Putting the fox responsible for guarding the henhouse is unlikely to sit well with rights and privacy groups, although they don’t exclude the utilization of technology to greatly help combat the crisis.
“However, States’ efforts to support the virus should not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance,” said a statement issued Thursday by 100 rights groups including Amnesty International, Privacy International and Human Rights Watch.
They said any extra digital surveillance powers ought to be necessary, proportionate and temporary.
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