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Cellphone apps designed to track covid-19 spread struggle worldwide amid privacy concerns

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Tue, 2020-08-18 11:53 — mike kraft
Cellphone apps designed to track covid-19 spread struggle worldwide amid privacy concerns Widely touted initiatives to introduce privacy-friendly, voluntary smartphone apps to help track the spread of coronavirus have largely foundered. Craig Timberg, Steve Hendrix, Min Joo Kim, Fiona Weber-Steinhaus Washington Post

A global wave of experimentation in using smartphones to combat the spread of covid-19 has stumbled over privacy concerns, security glitches and slow program rollouts, leaving dozens of initiatives, including in the United States, with little evidence of success.

Some particularly aggressive tactics — such as alerts giving the locations and other details of outbreaks in South Korea and the monitoring of government-ordered quarantines in Kuwait — may have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, public health experts say. But they also sparked criticism from privacy advocates. An Israeli state intelligence program that used cellphone data to track the movements of individuals and ordered quarantines by text message helped curb infections, supporters said, but legal challenges stopped it.

Widely touted initiatives to introduce privacy-friendly, voluntary smartphone apps have not had a demonstrable impact on the pandemic, researchers and public health officials say, despite a partnership between Silicon Valley rivals Google and Apple to make such technology work across different types of smartphones. Apps based on this partnership have been introduced in 14 countries, as well as in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.

Virginia earlier this month released the first statewide app in the United States based on the Google-Apple technology, which has been under development since April, and Alabama launched a limited pilot version. Though there is no overall national effort to build such an app in the United States, Google says there are initiatives underway in 20 states and territories covering nearly half of the national population.

But public health experts monitoring such efforts across the globe have grown discouraged at a time when the coronavirus is surging in the United States and other nations, with confirmed new cases worldwide now measured in the hundreds of thousands each day.

“It’s kind of a mess,” said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. “So far nothing has been consequential. … We don’t really know if it’s working or not working.” ...

 

 

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Tue, 2020-08-18 13:29 — mike kraft

Review | I downloaded America’s first coronavirus exposure app. You should too. Bluetooth exposure-notification apps like Virginia’s Covidwise aren’t much of a privacy risk. But we won’t know if they’re useful until many more people try them. Geoffrey Fowler Washington Post

...

For the past week and a half, 35 Washington Post staff members have been helping me test America’s first exposure-notification app using technology from Apple and Google. It’s called Covidwise, and works in the state of Virginia. Made by state health departments, similar apps are also now available in North Dakota (Care19 Alert), Wyoming (also called Care19 Alert), and Alabama (Guidesafe). In total, 20 states and territories are developing apps that will cover nearly half the U.S. population.

 (the writer's) takeaway: Despite its eerie power, this type of app isn’t a privacy invasion. It never records your location or shares whom you come in contact with. But it’s also possible apps like Covidwise aren’t very effective — in our team’s first 10 days of testing, we didn’t get a single exposure alert.  ...

 

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