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James Crabtree is an associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of “The Billionaire Raj”.
As countries begin to loosen social distancing rules in the coming weeks, political leaders are desperately seeking ways to return some form of normalcy to economies hit by COVID-19. Optimists believe that a new generation of contact tracking applications could help manage future outbreaks, reducing the need to damage new blocks.
Such hopes are understandable. However, the idea that a new generation of applications could act as a key to the future reopening is almost exaggerated.
Hopes for tracking digital contacts took off on March 21, when the Singapore government launched its TraceTogether app. Once installed, the program uses Bluetooth to scan nearby phones, keeping track of the devices that also have the application running.
If a TraceTogether user contracts COVID-19, the application can warn other users with whom they have been in contact, for example, on public transport or sitting in a cafe. The infected user can choose to send their records to the Singapore Ministry of Health. If they do, their information will be available to contact the tracking teams, adding an additional layer of data to complement their focus on in-depth interviews with patients about their whereabouts before infection, as well as sources such as CCTV and card records of credit.
Dozens of similar schemes are currently under development worldwide. Perhaps most significant came April 11, when Apple and Google said they would develop a decentralized system to shore up other applications created on their iOS and Android operating systems.
All of this sounds welcome given the growing understanding that many countries will have to handle repeated outbreaks of COVID-19 until a vaccine is developed.
Singapore’s case is instructive here, as the city-state is now battling its third wave of infections. The first two, which came through China and the workers who returned from abroad, respectively, were managed effectively. The third, which involves outbreaks in migrant worker dormitories, has been more problematic, pushing confirmed cases on the island to more than 6,500.
Migrant workers stand in front of their rooms in a dormitory declared an isolation area in Singapore on April 21: The city-state is battling its third wave of infections.
© Reuters
“COVID-19 will be with us for many more months, and probably beyond the end of the year,” as Lawrence Wong, co-chair of the Singapore government’s COVID-19 working group, put it on April 17. “We have to be prepared for future waves of infection and we have to prepare for a long fight.”
New large-scale contact tracking systems are clearly a vital front in that battle, although so far there is little evidence to show how well applications really work.
TraceTogether has not released information on how many cases it has identified. Similar applications are likely to generate many false positives, for example by scanning Bluetooth connections through non-contacting neighbor walls. There is also a risk of abuse, as noted by Ross Anderson, a security expert at the University of Cambridge.
“Performing arts people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run through the park,” Anderson recently wrote. “The Russians will use the app to execute denial of service attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report the symptoms so the entire school is sent home.”
There are likely to be three other problems, the first being the need for mass adoption. The Singapore app now covers a fifth of the population. But developers believe that something closer to four-fifths is needed for similar applications to be truly effective.
The work of Apple and Google, which will be released in mid-May, is attractive precisely because of its potential scale, given the duo that runs the software on almost every smartphone in the world. Many other apps have also proven popular during the crisis, such as the Corona Map of South Korea, which provides data on local outbreaks. But none have reached something like the scale that contact tracking apps probably require.
This leaves public authorities facing a second dilemma of how to balance civil liberties and utility. If these apps are proven to work, there is a reasonable case for making them mandatory for a temporary period, just as many parents are required to vaccinate children. Mandatory apps have already been used to manage quarantine requests at home in countries like Hong Kong and South Korea.
However, this thinking alarms many in Western countries in particular, hence the more distributed approach taken by Apple and Google, which has been designed with strong privacy protection. His system would not share data with public authorities, merely informing individual users and expecting them to act on that advice.
This simply introduces a third challenge of integration with public health systems. Here Singapore’s relatively centralized model works best. But the approach taken by Apple and Google could end up giving data to millions of citizens in ways that are effectively invisible to health authorities, complicating attempts to control the spread of the disease.
Some of these issues should be solvable, meaning that applications of this type could end up becoming one useful tool among many in the broader pandemic battle. However, it will be much more important to build the pandemic management infrastructure, from hiring small armies of human contact trackers to creating massive testing regimes to target millions of citizens. Any user knows that apps can be a terrible distraction. This time they cannot afford to be.
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