Contact-tracing apps have a trust problem, even if they do protect your privacy

On a call that explains how their contact tracking capabilities would work the COVID-19 pandemicRepresentatives from Google and Apple presented their greatest challenge: making people so comfortable that they could actually use the technology. The entire project – a mission that two of the world’s largest technology companies teamed up with about three weeks ago – would fail if they couldn’t convince enough people to sign up.

To do this, Apple, Google, and any government that wants to use a contact tracking app must overcome a mountain of skepticism that has arisen in part from the long history of data misuse in the technology industry. For years, lawmakers, data protection officers and regulators have been deceived by technology companies that have used technical details to hide their tracking capabilities.

The “act quickly and break things” mindset has spawned innovations, but also deeply broken public confidence in big tech. Facebook’s mission “bring the world closer together“It also helps collect millions of targeted advertising information. Google offers learning tools and directions through its map services, but it also faces litigation over tracking location data and allegedly collecting student biometric data. Apple has privacy converted into data. ” has a characteristic of its products before shot at his rivals for their tendency to share their users’ information.

To track people who have been exposed to COVID-19, technology companies and governments have proposed contact tracking apps as a solution. Such apps would add a technical element to something that healthcare workers have been doing manually for decades, where they have thoroughly interviewed people to get a history of who these people may have been infected with. But some of the same tools that have fueled distrust of big tech suggest the industry as part of the answer. Critics warn that the whole effort could fail if the tech industry can’t pull out of the hole their own missteps have dug up over the years.

“Both the companies that use these things and the governments must overcome a hurdle to encourage people to trust that these systems are for their own good,” he said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior technologist at American Civil Liberties Union. “The data protection landscape has been a disaster in recent years.”

The technology giants want to improve the concept of manual contact tracking by logging exposures using Bluetooth technology instead of relying on someone’s memory. The Apple and Google concept, as well as a proposal from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intend to use randomly generated IDs on devices that silently send Bluetooth signals to other devices on which the app is installed.

If people flag themselves as COVID-19 positive and agree to share this information through the app, any device that interacts with the ID of those people for a selected period of time will receive a notification of possible exposure to the disease.

Governments in the U.S., UK, and Singapore have embraced this concept, but for this to work, people have to download the technology. And government officials introducing this tool have found this to be particularly challenging.

Adoption rates

Apple and Google did not provide an exact number of how much of the population they would actually need for their contact tracking solution to work. They just found that every new person who downloads the app has an exponential impact.

However, a study by Oxford University found that governments need 56% of the population to use the app to stop COVID-19 from spreading. The study used a computer model of a city of 1 million people based on demographics and mobile phone usage in the UK.

“Our results suggest that a digital contact tracking app, when carefully implemented with other measures, can significantly reduce the number of new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and intensive care admissions,” said Christopher Fraser, the lead researcher behind the report. said in a post. “Our models show that if about 60% of the population use the app, we can stop the epidemic, and even with fewer app users, we still estimate the number of cases and deaths of coronaviruses.”

In Singapore it is The government’s national development minister told The Straits Times 75% of the population would need to download the country’s TraceTogether contact tracking app to be really effective.

In many countries, however, the adoption rate required does not match the current acceptance rate. This was found in a study published by the Pew Research Center on April 16 60% of Americans believe that location tracking has no impact on limiting the spread of COVID-19and only 45% believe it is acceptable to track people who have had contact with an infected person.

In countries like France, Germany and Italy, the acceptance rate for downloading contact tracking apps ranged from 67.5% to 85.5%. According to a survey by Oxford University.

Governments also cannot solve the adoption rate problem by making contact tracking apps mandatory.

Apple and Google said that any government agencies that require people to use their contact tracking services would violate their terms and that tracking tools should be activated. There are concerns that governments will intentionally receive incorrect data when contact tracking apps become mandatory, or that employees will find workarounds for the requirements.

For example, if these apps were mandatory, people could continue to choose not to register as COVID-19 positive for fear of government overruns, further spreading the disease without informing people about the exposure .

The entire system of contact tracking apps is based on trust, from installing the apps to using them by the user, the ACLU explained in a white paper.

And despite all the resources that governments and technology companies provide, there is a lack of trust.

Tech skeptic

Apple and Google say they have spent most of their privacy efforts White paper on cryptography and Bluetooth specifications behind their contact tracing technology. The companies have also promised to turn the technology off after the pandemic ends.

The collected IDs should be deleted every 14 days and are only saved on people’s devices, unless they have marked themselves as COVID-19 positive. The cryptography behind the service is said to completely separate these IDs from personal information and to be used only for COVID-19 tracking, the companies said.

The tracking app won’t be available until May, but the TraceTogether app in Singapore can serve as a case study of how receptive people will be.

TraceTogether was released in March by the Singaporean government and follows many of the same principles that Apple and Google apply. The data is encrypted locally and consent is required to share COVID-19 positive cases.

Despite government assurances that the service protects people’s privacy and is a public health benefit, only about every sixth user has downloaded the app. About a month after its release, Singapore was banned due to problems with the COVID-19 curve flattening.

French security researcher Baptiste Robert looked at the technical details behind Singapore’s app and found no open privacy issues with the service.

“Singapore is a very good example of the fact that despite an app to protect privacy, there is no adoption. Technically, everything was done well,” said Robert. “The type of app is why people didn’t download it. People don’t understand the technical details behind the app, they just understand that the government wants to track me down.”

Businesses and governments need to make people trust not only that their privacy is protected, but also that the contact tracking apps actually work. There are concerns about false positives and unreliable data coming from these apps, and no evidence that these systems are actually a solution.

The director of the TraceTogether app in Singapore, arguing that technology cannot replace manual contact tracking, warned that lives were at stake during this pandemic.

Apple and Google also found that tests for COVID-19 must be available for the apps to work, which is currently not possible in the United States.

“Basically, we don’t know if any of them actually work,” said ACLU’s Gillmor. “These are suggestions to help with the pandemic, but we don’t know it will work the way we want it to do. None of them will work very well unless we have adequate testing and medical facilities.” Treat people. ”

Trust case

Any contact tracking setup, including Apple and Google technology, must gain public trust for the system to work. Nobody has a complete solution to the trust dilemma, but a group offers some advice.

The ACLU proposed a number of guidelines This could ensure data protection and transparency for contact tracking services. The recommendations include full sign-up – no one can force you to use the app, whether it’s a government agency, company, or school.

https://www.cnet.com/videos/contact-tracing-explained-how-apps-can-slow-the-coronavirus/

Contact tracking providers would also have to ensure that the data collected was used to a limited extent and destroyed after use, and they would have to give people a method of verification. Evidence should also be provided that the system is beneficial for public health efforts and an obligation to close the service if it is not effective.

“The promise that Apple and Google will turn off the API is very welcome,” said Jennifer Stisa Granick, ACLU surveillance and cyber security consultant. “We just want to make sure that this is verifiable and that there will be an independent verification to ensure that the commitments are something that they live up to.”

Even if a contact tracking app follows all of these guidelines, building trust for a service that essentially tracks people on their phone is a major hurdle. Users have to view the apps as positive health benefits rather than surveillance risks.

“This is an unsolvable equation,” said Robert. “You can’t transfer the same app to everyone’s phone in one country. People will always be suspicious. It’s not a technical thing, it’s a human science thing.”

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a doctor or other qualified healthcare provider if you have any questions about an illness or health goals.