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minutes or so to make it nearly impossible to associ-
ate the number to a name. The only information the
software grabs for each phone are the unique num-
bers of other phones lingering nearby—close enough
to flag possible coronavirus transmission, should the
holder of any of those phones turn out to be infected.
To accommodate privacy concerns, the Goo-
gle-Apple software stops short of providing full
contact-tracing capabilities. Users have to down-
load contact-tracing apps that can make use of the
unique identifiers the phone gathers. If a user is
infected, they voluntarily report that fact to the
app, which then, with permission, sends out a list
of unique numbers representing the phones of the
people who might have been infected too in re-
cent days. Those numbers would go to a computerwith personal information such as their locations,
the names of people they’re with and, especially,
health information such as whether or not they’ve
been diagnosed with COVID-19 or exposed to it and
what symptoms they might have. The Health In-
surance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996,
also known as HIPAA, limits the sharing of infor-
mation about underlying health conditions among
health care organizations but doesn’t prevent most
companies from sharing information they happen
to get their hands on.
The Google-Apple scheme, like other proposals
from MIT, Stanford and elsewhere, is designed to
head off those concerns. For instance, it doesn’t
record locations or names. Instead, it assigns each
phone a unique number, which changes every 15The use of Bluetooth “SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASES THE PRIV
It’s no wonder there’s little appetite for requiring
people to submit to electronic tracking. Any smart-
phone-based contact-tracing apps would have to be
optional—optional to download, optional to acti-
vate, optional to self-isolate or get tested if notified
of exposure, optional to report being infected, and
optional to share related data with public-health
officials or anyone else.
In Europe, optional participation is not expected
to be a big impediment. An Oxford University survey
found acceptance of contact-tracing apps in Germa-
ny, Italy and France would run between 68 and 86
percent. In the US, by contrast, only 45 percent of
people find contact tracing with smartphones ac-
ceptable, according to a survey by the Pew Research
Center in April. “To prove really useful, at least 60
percent of the population would have to participate,”
says Jennifer Daskal, director of the Tech, Law, Se-
curity Program at American University Washington
College of Law. “With all the skepticism here, it’s not
clear how we’d get to that level of compliance.” It
doesn’t help that individual users get no direct ben-
efit from using an app, only the possible privilege of
being notified of the need to go back into quaran-
tine. The benefit accrues to everyone else.
Privacy advocates say there are legitimate fears
about a contact-tracing policy that would allow or-
ganizations to identify individuals by name, along