The concept is easy to understand: the phone you already have in your pocket will communicate with other phones nearby, and if one of those phones belongs to a person who shortly thereafter tests positive for COVID, in between Facebook alerts and reminders to feed your virtual Neko Atsume cats, your phone will notify you of this potential exposure.
Governments around the world hailed this technology as a “game changer” for contact tracing, one method through which public health officials look to contain a pandemic’s spread. If it is possible to quickly and easily identify all the people an infected person may have infected, and those people immediately self-quarantine, exponential spread should be stopped in its tracks.
Yet five months into our new world, contact tracing apps are less promising than ever. The reason: privacy concerns every step of the way, from development to adoption.
Experts agree it is theoretically possible to create a functional contact tracing app that protects user privacy by not centralizing personal data. But distrust abounds. Both Apple and Google rolled out operating system technology for contact tracing app developers that relies on this decentralized data approach. Yet, due to poor actions and flimsy security in the past by tech giants, governments around the globe have expressed skepticism that these systems, which incorporate GPS-based monitoring of users, are truly airtight. The fear is that the right hacker and the wrong soft spot in security could expose a detailed record of daily movements of every user on the planet. Such a possibility raises concerns that are ethical, philosophical, and legal.
To sidestep this issue, some governments have attempted to develop apps based on Bluetooth rather than GPS. Phones will use their Bluetooth functions to anonymously communicate with other phones in their proximity, no GPS required. However, because Bluetooth has a wide physical range, these apps lack the precision of the GPS-based technology made available through Apple and Google. Attempts to mitigate these issues have been overly restrictive. For example, the Bluetooth-based app released by the French government only managed to identify 14 potential cases of exposure nationwide.
Even if a government were able to develop an app it could guarantee was totally and completely devoid of privacy concerns, would enough citizens trust that was true?
Modeling out of Oxford University suggests a full 60% of a population needs to download and use the app for a contact tracing app to help reduce community spread. In a local context, that is a little lower than the 67% of Americans who watched the 2019 Super Bowl, and about the same percentage of eligible Americans who voted in the 2016 Presidential election.
About 66% of Americans told Pew Research in June that they regularly wear masks outside their homes, and if true, that suggests there could be widespread buy-in to a simple, trustworthy contact-tracing app. Still, so far the nation with the most widespread adoption of a contact-tracing app has been tiny Iceland, which capped out at 38%. It seems while people around the globe use the internet to willingly hand their private information to corporations every day, as a species we remain deeply skeptical of being tracked by our governments.
Even if Americans were racing to potentially be monitored, only four states have announced their intention to make a contact-tracing app available: Alabama, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia. In contrast, 17 states including Texas have definitively said they will not produce such an app. No state has publicly unveiled an app, months into the crisis, as cases in the United States continue to surge.
Other countries, such as New Zealand and Taiwan, have managed to stamp out COVID without widespread use of contact-tracing apps.
All this suggests that our modern COVID problem may ultimately be solved through relatively old-fashioned means: limit contact with others, wear a mask, and wash your hands.
