22 NEWSWEEK.COM
servers rather than on individuals’ phones.
Anonymity is another soft spot for contact-trac-
ing schemes. Google-Apple’s system of using ev-
er-changing identifiers is meant to ensure that in-
formation can’t be used to identify the individuals
to whom the phones belong. But no such scheme
has ever proven unbreakable—all kinds of sup-
posedly “de-identified” information has later been
“re-identified.” One easy way to do it is to glean
health-related comments from social media along
with the names of the posters and correlate the
comments with de-identified medical information.
In 2018, Facebook worked with Stanford Universi-
ty’s health care system and the American College of
Cardiology to explore exactly that sort of approach.
And last year Facebook for a time allowed outside
companies to pore over supposedly private group
posts to extract health information that could in
theory be used for that purpose as well.
Even Google-Apple’s extensive protections can’t
guarantee the privacy of contact-tracing partici-
pants, says Butler. “There are lots of ways hackers
and others could reverse-engineer the system to
re-identify people who have been infected,” he says.
(Google did not respond to a request for comment.
An Apple spokesperson referred Newsweek to previ-
ously published material from the two companies.)
The downside risk for users of contact-tracing
apps is high. Information about who is infected or
who was in proximity to whom, if hacked, could
have an impact on individuals’ employment, person-
al relationships and public reputations. “It’s not hard
to understand why law enforcement, intelligence
agencies or foreign malicious actors might want to
make use of proximity-tracking data,” says Daskal.
Proponents argue that the risk of misuse of data
could be contained by ensuring data is regularly de-
leted as it becomes irrelevant to managing infection—
after about two weeks, according to the Google-Apple
scheme—and that the entire system is dismantled
when the pandemic crisis has passed. But privacy
advocates note that most of the “temporary” inves-
tigatory mechanisms put in place in the US in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 remain in effect today.
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all of these risks might prove acceptable to
a big swath of the American public if a proposed
contact-tracing system could be counted on toplay a big role in taming the pandemic. But even
if enough people opted in to the system and chose
to faithfully report their own infections and com-
ply with self-isolation, plans like Google-Apple’s
would likely have so many false alarms and missed
exposures that people would lose faith in them,
says Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University
of Washington Law School and co-director of the
school’s Tech Policy Lab. “They just wouldn’t be ef-
fective, and in fact could do more harm than good.”
Calo, who recently testified before the Senate
on privacy issues in the coronavirus response,
notes that Bluetooth signals can easily penetrateUNCOORDINATED
The U.S. has no central
health authority, relying
instead on a patchwork of
local and state institutions.
Top to bottom: A homeless
person in April in New
York City; a May day in
Brooklyn; “Most public
health infrastructure
happens at the local level,
if it happens anywhere
at all,” says health care
attorney John Christiansen.MAY 22, 2020FRO^0TOP:
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