Apps to chase the virus open debate in Europe

When the Ebola outbreak in Guinea was detected in 2014, some health researchers pressured governments to create apps to monitor the spread of the disease, tracking mobile phones to locate people who may have interacted with someone infected. At that time, the use of apps was difficult to sell to the international community, raising doubts about the privacy of users and questioning the success of its usability.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, Asian countries have relied precisely on this technology to identify people who could have been exposed to the virus and monitor quarantines, with more or less success. In Chile, for example, CoronApp was created, an application available since mid-April that allows “self-assessment”, access to official information and quarantine monitoring.

In Europe, leaders, eager to reopen their societies, which in some cases have been confined for more than six weeks, are also relying on these systems, which were previously well-known. The obstacle is to convince its citizens to use them on a continent that is very jealous for their privacy. Some critics have already shouted to the sky, pointing out that these solutions are part of a larger project to control people, beyond monitoring the spread of the coronavirus itself.

The ideal of the continent is to find a common application among the countries that guarantees the anonymity of the citizens who use them. An idea that has been made possible thanks to the historic alliance announced in early April by Apple and Google, the two biggest rivals in the technology sector, which will help create a common interface and provide the necessary data from users based on bluetooth systems. .

In Singapore there is a similar application called Facetogether, which connects and registers via Bluetooth all mobile devices that are around a meter away. The objective is to know if the users have skipped the alarm state and the established social distancing. In order to function, the app uses a system known as geofencing, which launches a warning when entering a delimited area on a map, as if it were a barrier.

The European project pursues a similar model when using the bluetooth system, but does not seek to penalize citizens, but rather to monitor the chains of infections to prevent the virus from spreading without control. If a person tests positive for Covid-19, an alert will be sent to the phone of those who have been close so that they can quickly isolate themselves and carry out tests with the maximum possible efficiency, avoiding the possibility of infecting another.

The identities of the users will not be identified. As Carmela Troncoso, a privacy specialist at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland, and leader of a team working on the creation of a candidate protocol in Europe, assures, “in no way can the data be related to natural persons, its location, or people who have been close to the person identified with coronavirus. ” These data will, in any case, be “ephemeral identities” of people who have been diagnosed positive for coronavirus.

The success of the application, yes, depends largely on whether the bulk of the population is informed about its existence and uses it. Troncoso says that to be truly effective, the system needs to be used by at least 60% of the population, according to estimates by epidemiologists working on the project. Apple and Google suggest that each country make applications available for an operating system update to install on phones, always with the permission of the user. Thus, citizens should not actively search for and download it.

Respect for privacy has some limitations and bluetooth is not so precise as to determine if two people were close enough to transmit the virus, but they are the only possible way to introduce these apps in the European context. Among the specialists, there is consensus on the need for apps to track the virus, but not on how to develop them without ending up in potential bad hands.

A few days ago, scientists and researchers from more than 25 countries published an open letter urging governments not to abuse technology to spy on their people and warning about the risks of the approach of one of the development initiatives, defended by Germany, and criticized for being too centralized. “We are concerned that some solutions to the crisis may result in systems that allow unprecedented surveillance of society in general,” states the letter that brings together more than 300 firms.

Critics support a decentralized contact tracking protocol called DP-3T, started by Swiss researchers, that is aligned with a technology alliance between Apple and Google from Alphabet. The details revolve around whether the confidential data will be safely stored on mobile devices or whether it will be stored on a central server so that someone is able to reconstruct the information of where and when someone is with someone else.

Critics have also questioned whether seven countries have joined the PEPP-PT project (Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Malta, Spain and Switzerland). Spain and Switzerland now support rival DP-3T. The developers of PEPP-PT assured that the platform is committed to ensuring the protection of user data and stated their commitment to privacy in a document of more than 25 pages.

Germany plans to launch a contact tracking app in weeks that builds on this platform, and France, for the time being, has also backed the initiative. The PEPP-PT is designed to support national applications that could be interconnected, an objective that could be more difficult to achieve if countries rely on different initiatives.

Another debate that is on the table is whether the development of these applications on the continent is ethical and legal. As Antoni Pérez-Navarro, deputy director of Research at the eLearn Center of the Open University of Catalonia, in Spain, says, these types of apps, in fact, are nothing new. In the research center where he works, for example, in the past they developed a voluntary application to promote safe behavior in groups at risk of contracting HIV. “The application allowed these groups to indicate their contact sites and recommended them to use the condom when they approached them,” says the specialist.

According to European legislation, it is possible to develop applications that report the cases detected in an area, as long as they limit themselves to reporting the number of infections without revealing the identity of citizens, because that could violate the rights of affected by the virus.

It is not yet clear if this type of technology could help stop an outbreak of disease, because it has never been studied before, but in any case they will be part of the strategy and governments will continue to work to carry out tests and protect the population. The app would take only part of the job of tracking more people than doing a search manually, because it’s impossible to remember the people that someone interacts with or intersects with each day to trace the chain of contagions and issue a warning.

The automated system also makes it possible to identify unknown contacts on a large scale. The functions that allow the creation of the applications will be ready from May.