Can a technological
intervention stem the pandemic while avoiding the privacy pitfalls of location
tracking?
The UK Government recently
announced that it was ceasing development of its current contact-tracing app;
on the same day, the Canadian Government stated that it was developing one. All
this in the same week that the Norwegian health authority had to delete all
data gathered via its contact-tracing app and suspended further use due to a
ruling by the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. And if these examples are
not enough to demonstrate the utter confusion, the Australian app is reported
to have a bug that stops iPhones from reporting possible close contacts.
It’s clear that there is no
single or quick solution that is going to resolve the individual needs of the
world’s health and government agencies that are attempting to use technology to
assist in reducing the infection rates of COVID-19.
According to Wikipedia, more than 30 countries have, or are planning to
release, apps designed to contact trace or geo fence their users, for the
purposes of limiting and managing the spread of COVID-19. The development cycle
and distribution of these time-sensitive solutions is itself unprecedented. Ask
the members of any app development team if they could develop an app and the
infrastructure to support 100 million or more users in under three months and
they would say no – and that’s after they stop laughing at the suggestion.
Coming to a
phone near you
The concept of contact
tracing is to inform people that they may have come into contact with another
person who has contracted or is showing symptoms of an infectious ailment, in
this case COVID-19. The recipient of the notification can then take
precautionary measures, such as self-isolation.
This has proven a
successful tool to assist in eradicating other diseases such as smallpox and
has been used to control others such as tuberculosis, measles and HIV. With
large portions of the world population now carrying a smartphone, technology
should be able to play an important role, which is why we are seeing a surge in
the development of contact-tracing apps.
The majority of apps
available are government sponsored and use a variety of different methods to
fulfill their purpose, such as Bluetooth vs. GPS, centralized vs.
decentralized, and not all are sensitive to maintaining the privacy of the
user.
There are two main methods
being used to glean the physical proximity of users. The first is the global
positioning system (GPS): this uses satellite-based radio-navigation to
approximate the individual’s location and the location of other app users. The
second, more prominent, solution uses Bluetooth and signal strength to identify
other app users’ proximity, allowing the devices to exchange handshakes rather
than track actual location. There are some solutions that use a mix of both
Bluetooth and GPS and some even use network-based location tracking, but these
methods have significant location-tracking privacy issues and are fortunately
limited to only a few developments. The primary technology in use by COVID-19
contact-tracing apps is Bluetooth, as it provides a higher level of privacy
protection.
There is an underlying
issue though: Bluetooth discovery is not enabled while a phone is locked and
the app requesting it is not primary. Until now there has been no reason for
this to be enabled. Early versions of apps such as BlueTrace, the Singapore
government’s solution, relied on its users keeping their phones unlocked. The
UK NHS beta app had a unique solution to this, at least for Android, but it
would appear the limits implemented by Apple in iOS have meant that this was
unachievable and has required developers to work with the official Apple and
Google Exposure Notifications API.