Surveillance goes viral

Apple and Google’s partnership has sparked concerns among some digital privacy experts, as Sara Morrison reports for Recode. The concerns are both specific to Google, in particular, whose advertising business model depends on data collection, and general to the moment, governed increasingly as it is by public and private regimes of mass surveillance. “One way or another, everyone from location-data brokers to law enforcement can get access to a lot of your data through these companies’ devices,” she writes. “How will Apple and Google prevent their tool from being abused by governments with access to it?”

At the same time, Apple and Google appear to have taken good-faith measures to ensure user privacy, according to Jennifer Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. Crucially, the tool records only the proximity of one phone to another, not their locations, and protects its data to keep users anonymous.

The urgency of the pandemic has made even staunch privacy defenders more amenable to the prospect of increased surveillance. “These massive companies have the infrastructure and resources to do this,” Charlie Warzel at The Times says. “And there’s this feeling of almost, ‘Thank God someone’s stepping up.’ They’re trying to engineer this in a very privacy-focused way. At the same time, I fear the consolidation of power of companies that already have huge amounts of it.”

[Related: “How Apple and Google are tackling their Covid privacy problem”]

Setting privacy concerns aside …

Bluetooth contact tracing is not a replacement for manual contract tracing, according to Jason Bay, who spearheaded the development of Singapore’s app. There are two key reasons for this, as Sidney Fussell and Will Knight explain in Wired:

“Bluetooth can’t distinguish whether an infected person was within 6 feet for a length of time, or behind a glass wall, or in the apartment next door, or wearing a mask and gloves,” they write, so the number of false positives could overwhelm health officials.

For a contact-tracing app to be effective, roughly 50 percent to 70 percent of a population has to use it. But in Singapore, only about 20 percent of people have downloaded the government’s app.

To be sure, manual contact tracing would be an enormous undertaking, Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, writes in The Times. He estimates the government would need to recruit “an army” of 300,000 people to do the work.

But the “good” news is that there are millions of people now looking for employment, Casey Newton writes at The Verge. Helping state and county health programs hire contact tracers, he says, would be a wise use of stimulus money. “For now it seems worth saying that there’s little evidence that phones are good at contact tracing — and a lot of evidence that human beings are,” he writes. “As we prepare to begin reopening society, the biggest investment we need to make is in people.”

Even together, armies and apps aren’t enough

Because of the shortage of tests in the United States, contact tracing of any kind is currently impossible to do on a large enough scale. A comprehensive contact-tracing program would entail performing 2.5 million tests per day, according to one estimate, but nationwide daily testing capacity has plateaued at about 145,000. Closing the gap, Ezekiel Emmanuel and Paul Romer write in The Atlantic, would require a nationwide mobilization of laboratories, not to mention funding from Congress.

The bottom line is that any contact-tracing strategy has to be part of a much broader and coordinated public-health effort, according to Shirin Ghaffary at Recode. “Having an app tell you you’ve been exposed to Covid-19 is helpful, but it’s only the first step we’re seeing in effective international responses,” she writes. “For these notifications to be of any use, people need access to proper testing, health care systems, and financial support to get through a period of quarantine and potential illness.” Without that infrastructure in place, Apple and Google’s tool may prove as fruitless as a virus without a host, little more than a piece of code.