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Almost everyone reading this will have a smartphone, and almost all those smartphones will have WhatsApp installed. In its main markets, those with the highest penetration, the leading messaging platform has little more than a 80% install base among smartphone users. Getting there has taken 11 years.
Now let’s talk about contact tracking. These Bluetooth proximity apps are making daily headlines as the debate on privacy effectiveness continues. Building on perceived success in Asia, applications are now launching in the West. And with Apple and Google’s recent joint program to unlock technical capabilities while preserving privacy, apps have been announced as a central controller to end locks.
According to the modelers, to achieve the desired level of effectiveness, those applications must be installed and used by 60% of the population, that is, around 80% of smartphone users. Those apps need to get to the same level that WhatsApp has achieved in their best markets for 11 years, and they should do it within the next 11 weeks or so. METERMost of those markets don’t even have 80% penetration for WhatsApp.
In the weeks since Apple and Google announced their participation in global contact tracking applications, the debate has focused more on data protection and user privacy than on effectiveness. It matters more what data is collected and where it is stored, than how short-range Bluetooth proximity calculations work in practice, and how many alerts a typical London, Paris, or Berlin resident is likely to receive during a typical work week. And that is the fatal flaw.
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As soon as contact tracking turned into a privacy debate, its true purpose was lost. You can have privacy or you can have efficiency, you can’t have both. Anything in between is a commitment, and one or the other or more likely both will suffer. If you excuse the health-related analogy, it’s like trying to get half pregnant.
The reality is, with some privacy and freedom commitments, which require some tough decisions, a truly powerful contact tracking platform is technically possible. Needs to be he joined– Apps, phone location tracking, manual trackers, CCTV monitoring, and smartphone passes that allow us to travel and work. But we are not prepared for any of that, we are more concerned with where our location data is stored. We will ignore the fact that Google and countless marketing agencies collect all of this anyway, with much more granularity than either of these applications.
When we were informed about the successes in following up on contacts in Asia, the approach was much more complex than is accepted in the West. Much more use of mobile data and the broader surveillance ecosystem, many manual chases and public announcements, a concerted campaign to eradicate the virus.
The debate on privacy has clouded that effectiveness and the debate on the results. And that means the real challenges of adoption and persistent use have been lost along the way. As these applications are deployed, these will be the reasons why they will fail and the diluted nature of those privacy friendly implementations will struggle.
I’ve written before about the adoption challenge when it comes to contact tracking. TThe magical 60% of the population, promoted by modelers as to where efficiency is achieved. What is generally lost in the analysis is the long-term duration of use, from summer to next winter, beyond. The amount of false alerts that people can bear. How the applications will work in London and Paris.
As cyberguru Ian Thornton-Trump points out, “So what do we do when COVID-20 hits with a slightly muted version of COVID-19? Will there be compliance? What about those thousands of workers who may not have access to a smartphone with the ability to run the app?
“Download the app to protect the NHS and save lives,” Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of Health. urged on May 4, when the country’s contact tracking app was pilot-launched to 150,000 White Isle citizens. The app has had a few initial issues: rejecting Apple and Google’s decentralized approach because it needs central data analysis to track the virus, and then fail the first cyber security tests. But is about to live on a sparsely populated UK island as a test bed for overcrowded metropolises where the virus is most likely to spread.
At the moment, we are familiar with many of the statistics: Singapore’s TraceTogether only reaches 20% of its population, Australia’s COVIDSafe reduces its target to just 40%, and between 10% and 20% has already installed the application . Globally, governments that have never had to deal with app penetration statistics are beginning to realize how difficult it is to get four out of five smartphone users to download the same app and then use it rigorously.
WhatsApp is useful and fun. It does not tell you to stay home or miss work, it does not suggest that you may be infected, and 24 hours later it tells you that you made a mistake. It is rarely disabled or uninstalled, although that happens, even with WhatsApp. And yet, it has taken the platform more than a decade to reach the levels of acceptance that the UK government, for example, believes can be done with a marketing campaign, a postal mail to households and a slogan. .
Despite surveys suggesting moderate initial use of apps, there will be an initial surge in demand as millions rush to see how they work. How many will continue to use those applications at Christmas while we see how that busy time of year works in this pre-vaccine surreal that we will see. However, at no time will there be 80% of smartphone users on board. Certainly not west opt-in / opt-out.
There is an irony buried here somewhere. Tracking contacts has been effective in Asia, where telephones have played a major role, but manual effort and other surveillance measures have played a larger role. Phones can tell us where a person has been, but then it has been more effective to call contacts, watch CCTV, send messages, and send text messages to those who we know have been to the same place. Many analyzes have been conducted that now cause manual contact trackers, let alone in the surveillance infrastructure that is their inventory.
And just as we worry about the hypothetical risk that health services and governments will capture and use our data en masse, we are drifting further and further away from the actual surveillance we likely need to have a truly effective contact tracking system. Right now, we are not asking for that. But depending on how the next six to nine months unfold, some more localized crashes, spikes of infection and facility closings, and we may change our minds.
The sad reality is that, for contact tracking to be fully effective, applications must be mandatory and linked to our right to travel and work. If there is a risk of infection, those rights should be suspended until testing is done or we have isolated ourselves. All of this can be linked and automated and managed through our smartphones. All this is very far from what would be politically acceptable in the countries where we live.
As the product leader behind TraceTogether explained, “If you ask me if any Bluetooth contact tracking system … is ready to replace manual contact tracking, I will say without qualification that the answer is, no … There are lives in game”. False positives and false negatives have consequences in real life (and in death). ”
Thornton-Trump agrees, “The app won’t keep you safe from infection: This is the latest thing to do to make the public stop thinking that there is an easy technological solution to complex epidemiology for a disease we’ve just begun to study. and understand … There is an erroneous belief that technology has the answers. It is important to have the right requirements in this. If we don’t, it will have serious consequences for our society and exacerbate existing social inequalities. “
This is just the beginning, as the technology we have seen in Asia now reaches the West on a large scale, dpowered by the combined reach of Google and Apple and our collective desire for a simple solution to a terribly complex problem. However, the unfortunate truth is that the premise for such solutions is that they can be central to the fight without the difficult decisions that must be side by side is fatally flawed. We have known this for a while. But it is as if governments are simply not listening.
