Contact Tracing and Tech

In the fight against coronavirus, you’d expect that tech solutions, as in smartphone apps and location tracking, would be vastly superior in the land of Silicon Valley (and the West in general). But as with all things coronavirus, it’s the East that has used tech better…

In January, when China issued the lockdown in Wuhan, they used old-fashioned barricades. But by the time they reopened Wuhan on April 8:

“At checkpoints throughout the city, police and security guards demanded that anyone seeking to come and go present a QR code on their mobile phones that rates the user’s risk of catching the coronavirus. Green codes granted unrestricted movement. A yellow code required seven days of quarantine. Red meant 14 days of quarantine.”

More and more countries have created such apps to track coronavirus. Many of them don’t just help the government, they even notify users if they’ve been close to infected people. The most downloaded such app till date? India’s Aarogya Setu app, at 75 million downloads. All voluntary. But will the government make it mandatory next? Will the app become an “immunity passport”, similar to the ones in China? There are concerns whether such a move is constitutionally valid, and of course, privacy concerns: what else might the app be tracking?

It is exactly such questions on legality and privacy that are slowing the deployment of such apps in the West. In Australia, there have been calls that the data collected from such apps should only be available for health/pandemic purposes, but should not be made available to law enforcement agencies. In Israel, such apps were used by the cops to check if individuals were staying quarantined, when ordered to do so. But now:

“An oversight group in Israel's parliament blocked an attempt to extend the emergency measures past this week.”

In the US, Apple and Google came together to allow iPhones and Android devices to talk to each other:

“If someone is then confirmed as having the coronavirus, their phones send out a new signal alerting all the phones they'd come in contact with over the preceding 14 days.”

The next step?

“The companies will offer programming tools to developers in mid-May, allowing health authorities to build apps with this new technology.”

But these efforts have run into resistance over privacy concerns already.

Isn’t it ironic that the less developed countries are the ones deploying tech solutions, not the advanced West? And yet again, it all traces back to one of the core values of the West: the privacy rights of the individual.