Newsweek - USA (2020-05-22)

NEWSWEEK.COM 21

TECHNOLOGY

Let Google, Apple or other tech giants run a na-

tional contact-tracing program and take control

of the information? Unlikely. A study by the Kaiser

Family Foundation found that half as many people

would download a contact-tracing app from a tech

company as from a public-health agency.

The best bet for a quasi-trusted authority capable

of managing a large contact-tracing-app program

might be a coalition of state-level health care players

including hospitals, insurers and state health agencies,

says Christiansen. Some states, including Washington,

have coalitions in place to manage health-record

sharing and uniform billing. But whether enough of

these coalitions could be formed in time, and whether

they’d be able to effectively manage such a massive

public-health effort and reach a large-enough share

of the population, are shaky propositions, he adds.

Is It Secure?

most of the world’s automated contact-trac-

ing schemes take measures to hide individual iden-

tities, typically through some form of “information

blurring”—stripping out identifiable information

such as names, randomly altering just enough of

the data to prevent personal identification or re-

placing detailed data with aggregated summaries.

The Google-Apple plan goes further: it never

records identifiable information in the first place,

and it stores what information it does record on

each user’s phone and nowhere else.

The trouble is, phones are easily hacked. Compa-

nies, for instance, routinely harvest data from the

phones of people who wander into stores, via open

Bluetooth and wifi channels. That data includes

mobile tracking numbers assigned to each device.

The data is often sold to third-party data brokers

where it becomes part of the information economy,

exploited for targeting ads and other purposes. The

Google-Apple system relies on an always-on Blue-

tooth connection on each user’s phone in order

to detect nearby phones and to swap the special

contact-tracing numbers unique to each phone.

“That significantly increases the privacy risks of any

contact-tracing system that uses Bluetooth,” says

Alan Butler, interim executive director and gener-

al counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information

Center, a privacy advocacy group in Washington,

D.C. And it’s one big reason the UK chose to go with

a scheme that stores information on centralized

ACY RISKS” of contact-tracing.

run by whatever organization is managing the

contact-tracing effort—most likely a government

health department—which would send out some

sort of “you might have been exposed” notification,

along with instructions for quarantine and testing.

Where would the apps come from, and who

would oversee them? In all non-US countries with

automated contact tracing, government health

agencies at the national level, such as the UK’s Na-

tional Health Service, select the app and determine

key details: how users report infections, who is no-

tified when, what information is stored where. But

the US has no such organization. The closest thing

is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC), which does not have the authority to dic-

tate detailed policies. “We’ve never had a national

public-health infrastructure capable of handling

this sort of task,” says John Christiansen, an Olym-

pia, Washington attorney specializing in public

and private health information technology. “We

don’t even have many state public health agencies

that are strong enough. Most public health infra-

structure happens at the local level, if it happens

anywhere at all.”

The thought of a patchwork of city or coun-

ty-level programs across the nation all specify-

ing their own apps and policies doesn’t inspire

much confidence. But neither do the alternatives.

LIFE AND LIBERTY

Americans chafe at many

measures to control

COVID-1 9 that have

worked succesffully in

South Korea and other

countries. Top to bottom:

Police confront protesters

in Sacramento, California;

a drive-thru coronavirus

testing site in Somerville,

Massachusetts; Kelly

Lyda, owner of Aspen Cafe

in Stillwater, Oklahoma,

which dropped its

directive that customers

FR in shops wear masks.

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