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Human mobility data will play an important role in efforts to understand the pandemic during the summer. It will have serious limitations.
Smartphone data, linked to coronavirus testing, will play a critical role in the next phase of the government’s response to the COVID-19-19 pandemic. Almost everyone in the United States carries a smartphone in their pocket capable of informing the user about what they are coming into contact with their environment. Concerns about the privacy implications of various “tracking” applications are well documented, but as developers strive to build them with the right balance of security and privacy, the less clear they will really work.
Apple and Google are moving forward with guidelines to help developers create applications to alert people when they have contacted someone who may be infected with COVID-19-19.
Countries around the world are experimenting with different solutions, based on a variety of factors, such as local privacy laws and the strength of local testing regimes. Cybersecurity company FireEye released a list of security features Tuesday that developers should be aware of when encoding such applications.
Most of these apps have been described as “contact tracking apps,” a term that refers to the epidemiological practice of tracking real-world and social contacts of infected people. Instead, some technologists argue that what is emerging will best be described as “exposure notification” applications.
This will not end up looking like China. Instead of using a centralized database of people’s registered locations, similar to what the Chinese government implemented during the start of the post-closure phase of that country, the new applications would rely on Bluetooth to alert an individual when have been in contact with an exposed person. . Google and Apple have said that developers who use their API You will not be allowed to use location tracking, so Bluetooth proximity alert is the only option.
That requirement may immediately reject national security professionals who have long known that a basic step in keeping unwanted eyeballs away from your phone is to turn off your Bluetooth (and other location tracking apps). But the stipulation means that emerging apps will at least adhere to what privacy advocates like. ACLU They have recommended.
How well will those apps work?
“I think there are serious questions about the realistic effectiveness of any of the various approaches to circulating digital exposure alert, but from a privacy perspective, that approach [the Apple Google approach] it looks as good as one might expect: decentralized, anonymous and voluntary, “said Julian Sanchez, senior fellow at CATO.
Sánchez says that Bluetooth exposure alerts are not going to give governments a good idea of how transmissions are progressing. Also, an exposure reporting system will not work well if tests at the national or global level remain patchy and spotty. More and more people can access the tests through their health insurance, but others can only see a test when they get to an emergency room, and sometimes not even then. Any government will operate in the dark until the evidence reaches the population alike.
Cell location data is already feeding the tools for governments to form better responses to stop the virus from spreading. But in many states, the message the data provides is not the same as what policymakers say they want.
Across the country, many governors are pushing for relaxed measures of social distancing, arguing that such measures cost too high for businesses. But research taken from anonymous location data contradicts that idea. An April 20 article published by the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed the publicly available anonymous data on site visits gathered by technology company PlaceIQ and packaged by Berkeley researchers to understand how people changed. their behaviors as a result of the pandemic in March and April. . The data allowed the researchers to see how people moved before and after most of the social distancing guidelines were implemented. They were able to look at the state and county levels. But more importantly, it allowed them to observe the movement in real time, rather than waiting for government or market reports, which can take up to 14 days.
The researchers found that most people started a kind of self-imposed shutdown before local governments made such isolation mandatory. “Although they may be important from a public health point of view, our estimates so far suggest that government policies have primarily served as a small supplement to the voluntary increases in social distancing that individuals, families, and businesses have embraced on your own. ”
That aligns with what other researchers have observed looking at data like restaurant reservations.
A good graph doing the rounds shows that OpenTable’s reserves fell before state locks. @CharlesFLehman 2 / n pic.twitter.com/VmYlETzGYq
– Joel Waldfogel (@JWaldfogel) April 17, 2020
Basically, people are more inclined to act according to their own perceptions of relative safety and danger, rather than punitive government measures. But that does not mean that lifting such bans will not have an impact on public health. The authors of the article say it could well make things worse. While people were already prepared to keep separate from each other before governments issued their official decrees, when some governments start to lift those restrictions, it can compel people to loosen their own self-imposed rules even faster than they do. would do.
“In this case, lifting the ban could have major impacts, even if the enforcement of the ban had minor impacts,” they wrote.
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