<nettime> Contact tracing, Silicon Valley style

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

To judge from the article pasted below, the direction being taken
comes directly from Singapore's TraceTogether app, with a central
focus on recording Bluetooth contacts between phones. It's unknown
what kinds of supplementary measures might subsequently be added
(apparently in Singapore there are quite authoritarian police measures
taken in terms of individual surveillance). Is the Bluetooth idea just
a fig leaf? Will Google and Apple really abstain from using their
existing geolocation capacities? How could vague and imprecise contact
tracing work in the absence of any administrative follow-up?

Another thing is that this plan is not coming from the federal
government, nor only from the tech companies. It is being worked out
by governors and health experts in the absence of any clear initiative
from the Feds. This from a companion article:

"A collection of governors, former government officials, disease
specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three
pillars of disease control: ramp up testing to identify people who are
infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on
a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more
narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t
have to stay in permanent lockdown" (
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/10/contact-tracing-coronavirus-strategy).

After failing to remove Trump, the establishment is trying to route around
him. Meanwhile the would-be president has launched a new coronavirus team,
focused on restarting the economy on the basis of... we don't know what. In
short, something is beginning, but what it will really become is totally
uncertain. Nervous times - BH


Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in
contact with coronavirus

Tony Romm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/10/apple-google-tracking-coronavirus/

Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat
coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of
smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected
with the disease.

The changes the two companies announced targeting iPhone and Android
devices could inject valuable new technological support into contact
tracing, a strategy public-health officials say is essential to
allowing people to return to work and normal life while containing the
spread of the pandemic.

Apple and Google are hoping to harness Bluetooth, which is typically used
to connect device-owners’ wireless speakers and keyboards. With the aid of
the technology, public-health officials soon can deploy apps with the
ability to sense other smartphones nearby. If a person learns they have
coronavirus, they could indicate on their app they’ve been infected — and
people whose smartphones have been in their vicinity would be notified,
regardless of whether their devices run on Apple’s or Google software.

Apple and Google said they expect to make tools available to developers to
assemble such contact tracing apps as soon as mid-May, with further
enhancements to the operating systems that would expand the system’s reach
to follow.

The companies said the technology would not track a user’s specific
location or reveal an infected person’s identity to the tech giants or to
governments worldwide.

But the success of their efforts — an unprecedented collaboration between
two big tech rivals — will hinge on whether public-health officials can
create apps fast enough, and whether people download and use them
consistently. Most of all, it relies on the widespread availability of
testing, a lingering challenge in the United States, where many Americans
still cannot figure out if they’ve contracted coronavirus despite recent
claims from President Trump.

“All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more
important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing
problems,” they said in a joint statement. “Through close cooperation and
collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we
hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world
slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life.”

The new partnership reflects a growing recognition in Silicon Valley that
popular tech devices — and the troves of data they generate — can be put to
new use in tracking the pandemic.

In recent weeks, Facebook has sought to leverage social data about its
users’ whereabouts to help track the potential spread of coronavirus. Apple
and other companies debuted special symptom checkers to help people
determine if they need care. Google released detailed data about smartphone
users’ travel habits in 131 countries. And some marketers, once-unknown to
most Americans, have claimed to help public-health officials track the
effectiveness of social distancing around the globe.

But some of these sites and services have raised uncomfortable questions
about the balance between public health and privacy — and how to safeguard
people’s personal information even in the face of an urgent need to save
lives from a deadly infection. When White House officials last month began
engaging the tech industry about ways to harness location information —
discussions first reported by The Washington Post — privacy hawks and some
lawmakers balked. Many feared the government risked encroaching on
Americans’ private lives.

On Friday, Apple and Google stressed they would not be collecting anyone’s
precise coordinates for the purpose of combating coronavirus. Instead, a
device with a contact-tracing app would broadcast a unique signal every few
minutes to other, nearby devices, including those that come within six feet
of range. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended
six feet as the minimum for social distancing.

For now, users would have to choose to install these contact-tracing apps,
which are still under development by institutions like the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. And it would be entirely up to the individual to
indicate if they had contracted coronavirus, resulting in anonymous alerts
being sent to those who had been in that person’s proximity.

Epidemiologists and public-health officials have recently zeroed in on
Bluetooth technology as a vital tool for human teams seeking to trace and
stem the pandemic’s growth. Developers said it would complement human
contact-tracing efforts, in which public-health officials interview people
to find out who they made contact at the time of their infection.

Last month, a research team at the University of Oxford, writing in the
journal Science, said spread of coronavirus is “too fast to be contained by
manual contact tracing” and would need a Bluetooth-like technology to
complement their work. Such an app could “replace a week’s work of manual
contact tracing with instantaneous signals transmitted to and from a
central server,” they wrote.

“The intention is not to impose the technology as a permanent change to
society, but we believe it is under these pandemic circumstances it is
necessary and justified to protect public health," researchers said.

Some experts still point to challenges with the technology, including that
devices might link between walls, car doors or different floors of the same
building even when people don’t come in close contact. Human investigators
using low-tech interview techniques, they argue, will be critical to
determine actual risk.

“Bluetooth has promise, but it is extremely experimental and has problems,”
said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the
University of Toronto’s Munk School. “We've all spotted our neighbor's
Bluetooth speaker through a wall or a floor. Or seen someone's headset in a
traffic jam. That doesn't mean we will ever come within droplet distance of
them. Until engineers reliably figure out how to map Bluetooth onto droplet
distance, the approach is bound to yield a lot of false positives.”

With Apple and Google, an added challenge is that its entirely in the hands
of users: Because the system is voluntary, it relies on people downloading
and using it properly. To address concerns about potential abuse, users
would have to get a confirmed diagnosis from a public-health agency that
they have coronavirus -- along with a special code, for example -- that
triggers the signal to other devices, according to Apple.

Singapore has shown some early success through its Bluetooth tracking app,
TraceTogether, which links people’s infection status to their phone number.
Government officials across Europe have also discussed using Bluetooth
contact tracing, in which national agencies could review data connected to
people with persistent user IDs.

But getting even limited impact could be a challenge. Singapore’s app,
which launched last month, uses Bluetooth to identify when people have been
within six feet of each other for at least 30 minutes. If an infection is
confirmed, officials with the government’s health ministry call the person
to pursue aggressive quarantine actions.

A top Singapore official said earlier this month that three-quarters of the
nation’s population would need to download the contact-tracing app for it
to be effective — and that only one in six people, or roughly 1 million
Singaporeans, had installed the app so far. Singapore’s prime minister, Lee
Hsien Loong, said in a national address last week that the efforts had
failed to fully blunt the outbreak: “Despite our good contact tracing, for
nearly half of these cases, we do not know where or from whom the person
caught the virus.”

The Apple and Google effort could help unify the efforts of a growing team
of researchers that sees Bluetooth’s short-range, low-power technology as a
way to track social spread. The tech giants’ contribution could also help
the teams surmount some technical hurdles that prevented the systems from
functioning reliably during recent tests.

Bluetooth-based systems would not be a “silver bullet” towards tracking
infections and would only complement other efforts, said Rhys Fenwick, the
communications chief for one of the groups, Covid-Watch, working on such
technology. But he compared the idea to wearing masks: Though many people
still won’t use them or may use them wrong, encouraging their use could
help chip away at a vast global-health risk.

“It doesn’t have to be a perfect system,” he said. “It just has to be
better than the status quo.”



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