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

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

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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