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TECHNOLOGYwhich frequently harbor a deep distrust of shar-
ing information with public officials, particularly
out of fear it may be shared with law enforcement.
And many people in those communities will sim-
ply choose to ignore any notification to self-isolate
because they need to keep working to meet their
families’ most basic necessities “People in these
communities would be invisible to the whole auto-
mated contact-tracing model,” says Kirsten Ostherr,
director of Rice University’s Medical Futures Lab.Lowering Expectations
still, to say that cellphone contact-tracing
is going to return incomplete and flawed informa-
tion, fall far short of needed adoption rates and
may carry privacy risks is not to say we should skip
it altogether. Even the most ineffective versions ofwalls, car windows and other barriers that the
coronavirus can’t. That means many of the “you
need to self-isolate” notifications sent out by Blue-
tooth-based systems like Google-Apple’s would go
to people who couldn’t have been exposed. By the
same token, the system would completely miss se-
rious exposures caused by contacting, say, parti-
cles on surfaces or in the air freshly coughed-out
by an infected person who has just walked away
or left their phone in the other room or back in
their car, out of reach of proximity detection.
“You’d get false reassurances that you haven’t been
exposed, and there’d be a whole range of situa-
tions where you wouldn’t get notified when you
need to be,” says Calo.
The system itself is vulnerable to misdirection,
he says. Political operatives hoping to discouragevoter participation or malicious agents eager to
disrupt a neighborhood or an entire city could
arrange for dozens or even hundreds of people
to falsely report infections, triggering a slew of
phony notifications. South Korea and many other
countries limit these sorts of problems simply by
allowing their contact-tracing systems to gather
and store more data, including
GPS location data, personal health
records and video-camera images.
This extra data can validate or
eliminate proximity alerts, as well
as improve the accuracy of infec-
tion reporting. But it exacts a high
cost in privacy that most Ameri-
cans wouldn’t be willing to pay.
If these obstacles were overcome,
another problem would remain:
the vast inequities such a system
might inject into the coronavirus
battle. About 20 percent of Ameri-
cans don’t have smartphones, lock-
ing them out of the system. Most
live in vulnerable and predom-
inantly minority communities,the proposed schemes could still get hundreds of
thousands of people to self-isolate or get tested
when exposed, slicing off at least a small chunk of
the new-infection rate. Tens of millions of Amer-
icans will decide any extra risks to their privacy
will be a small price to pay for a chance to help
contain the disease.
The biggest danger to automated contact-tracing
schemes is that authorities and the public misplace
their faith in how much those schemes can con-
tribute and shortchange the tactics that likely will
do a much better job. That includes conventional
contact-training carried out by trained workers,
making rapid testing widely available and con-
tinuing to encourage and when necessary enforce
social-distancing and self-isolation policies.
If we take all those steps, says Daskal, we have a
real chance of reducing the infection rate to man-
ageable levels—and that’s when automated con-
tact-tracing might actually become a more workable
scheme. “If we can get closer to normal, then phone
contact-tracing can be useful in protecting against
small flare-ups becoming massive ones,” she says.
In the dystopia we now seem to inhabit, though,
“normal” seems so far away.There are lots of ways hackers and others could reverse-engineer
the system to RE-IDENTIFY PEOPLE who have been infected.”