Contact tracing apps are vital tools in the fight against coronavirus. But who decides how they work?
Contact tracing apps are vital tools in the fight against coronavirus. But who decides how they work?
Seth Lazar and Meru Sheel
The Conversation
Australia's contact tracing app, COVIDSafe, has been designed using an unsupported bluetooth protocol, for a purpose for which it wasn't intended. This has led to a number of serious privacy, security, and functionality problems. Some of these have been fixed with updates, others may not be resolvable (and some of the fixes may have unintended consequences). Apple and Google have joined forces to develop a new Bluetooth protocol to support contact tracing, which would be able to avoid all of these shortcomings. Members of the Australian government indicated an intention to switch to the new protocol. However, the Apple/Google protocol does not share some information with health authorities that is presently being shared—in particular, though it will advise the user (and potentially the health authority) that they have been exposed to risk, it won't tell the health authority precisely when or to whom the user was exposed. This information could potentially be invaluable for providing more personalised risk assessments, for tracing back where new, unexpected cases have come from, and in determining epidemiological properties of the virus, like its attack rate. In this article, co-authored with epidemiologist Meru Sheel, Seth Lazar questions whether tech companies or democratically-elected governments should decide how to weigh privacy against public health, when fundamental rights are not at stake.