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When Singapore launched the first such smartphone app last month to identify and alert people who had interacted with carriers of the new coronavirus, the city-state of approximately 5.7 million people had 385 cases of infections.
But even though the cases in the country, which is closed, have exceeded 9,000, only one in five people has downloaded the application, TraceTogether, which uses Bluetooth signals to log in when people have approached.
Modest figures in a tech-savvy country where trust in government is high show the challenges facing public health authorities and tech experts from around the world seeking to get out of blockades and believe that tracking apps Contacts can play an important role in restarting economies.
Some countries, including South Korea and Israel, are using high-tech contact tracking methods that involve tracking the location of people through telephone networks. But such centralized surveillance-based approaches are considered invasive and unacceptable in many countries for privacy reasons.
The Bluetooth approach, which is being applied in various stages by the governments of Europe and Latin America, as well as Australia and many Asian nations, requires that most people in a geographic area adopt it for it to be effective.
An app in India, believed to be the second in the world to launch after Singapore, has reached 50 million downloads on Android phones, which dominate the market. That’s a small fraction of the smartphone user base of 500 million people, not to mention the population of more than 1.3 billion.
“It takes a lot of effort on your part as a user and the value is not very tangible,” said Frederic Giron, a Singapore-based analyst at market research firm Forrester, referring to TraceTogether.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced new antivirus efforts on Tuesday and said “we will need everyone’s cooperation to install and use” applications like TraceTogether, although he did not say that it would be mandatory.
Efforts in Singapore, India, and elsewhere are still in their early stages. A joint initiative announced last week by Apple and Google could push the concept forward, in part by smoothing out key technical issues.
Apps are also of limited use during crashes, but could be much more attractive when people are in frequent contact again. Italian automaker Ferrari, for example, is launching a voluntary contact tracking app as part of its program to reopen its factories safely.
In Australia, the government suggested that such applications could be mandatory, although European governments and privacy advocates are fiercely opposed to this approach. Apple and Google say they won’t support mandatory tracking apps.
Also read: Smartphone vs virus: Will privacy always be the loser?
Confidence deficit
Bluetooth-based applications are designed to be more privacy-friendly than tracking techniques that use GPS or cell phone data. They use Bluetooth to transmit and receive a pseudonymous and encrypted signal from nearby phones and create a record of interactions that remain on the phone, so user names and numbers are not revealed.
If a person tests positive for COVID-19, people who were close to that person for a certain period of time can receive alerts through their phones. The India app also has other functions and uses GPS data to identify infection groups.
Some people in Singapore and India say they are willing to use the app, even at the cost of their privacy.
“Right now, I don’t care about privacy, at least in the midst of this crisis,” said Ganga Bopaiah, based in Bangalore, who works for an IT services company and already uses the Indian app, known as Aarogya Setu, which means “health bridge”.
“As long as COVID-19 is around, I will use it. In fact, I will use it more after the lock is lowered.”
Still, privacy is a contentious issue in India, especially in light of recent tensions between the government and the country’s minority Muslim population.
“There is always an element of doubt when the government asks you to disclose personal information,” said Harish Iyer, an Indian LGBT rights activist who has not downloaded the app.
Self-quarantine orders in the slums of India have also fueled mistrust among some Muslims who believe that health workers are collecting data under the guise of containing the pandemic.
Also read: Robust protection of personal data critical in the fight COVID-19
Complaints on the merits
The Indian government has been strongly supporting the Aarogya Setu app, sending emails to companies like Facebook and Google asking them to promote the app, an official from India’s IT ministry said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi also recommended that people download it.
Singapore has not put as much pressure on Trace Together to date, although the prime minister’s comments on Tuesday suggest that is changing.
A big complaint about TraceTogether is that it doesn’t work “in the background” on an iPhone, which means that the app must be open at all times, consuming energy and can interfere with other processes. Apple does not allow iPhone apps running in the background to access Bluetooth, for security reasons.
New tools that Apple has promised as part of its joint effort with Google will solve that problem, but only for applications that meet other requirements, such as forgoing the use of location data and not being required.
TraceTogether developers this week welcomed Google / Apple’s efforts and said they would work with companies’ upcoming technologies to improve the app.
Desmond Fu, an iPhone user in Singapore, said he would definitely use the app as long as the underlying problem is resolved.
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