Why aren’t coronavirus contact tracking apps a ‘game changer’?

Coronavirus contact tracking applications had an important role to play in how some countries dealt with the spread of the disease. But so far, they have had limited impact.

The apps alert people who approach someone who has tested positive for Covid-19, with the idea that the victim’s “contacts” would be tested and isolated themselves.

They were once heralded as a crucial part of some countries’ plans to lift their blockade restrictions. In the UK, for example, this type of application was regularly mentioned in daily coronavirus briefings, however the government is now downplaying its importance and has had to completely renew it.

Many of these apps rely on Bluetooth technology to send notifications when two smartphone owners approach each other. Some of them even track location data via GPS. But early in the development of such platforms, activists raised big concerns about how they would address privacy.

Enter Apple and Google. In April, the companies set out to introduce a “decentralized” framework for contact tracking applications that would aim to protect user data and ensure that it still works once people start traveling abroad. While Apple is often praised for taking user privacy seriously, Google has come under fire for weaknesses in data protection technology platforms. Suddenly, he was gaining applause for an apparent commitment to guarantee privacy by design.

“They certainly created a system that can be used for proximity tracking without risking the confidence of centralizing personal data,” Michael Veale, professor of digital rights and regulation at University College London, told CNBC.

Veale is part of a team of researchers who devised a system known as DP-3T, or Decentralized Proximity Tracking to preserve privacy. It is the protocol on which Apple and Google base their own contact tracking model.

“It remains to be seen whether any of these applications are useful in combating the virus on the ground,” Veale said, although he added that it was “too early” to rule them out.

In May, a report said Iceland had the highest penetration of any virus-tracking app, with 38% of its 364,000 residents installing it. But the Icelandic app, which collected people’s GPS data, “was not a game changer,” according to Gestur Pálmason, the deputy chief inspector for Iceland’s Covid-19 tracking team. Researchers from the University of Oxford have said that 60% of a country’s population would have to download a tracking app for it to be effective.

“There is not a single country in the world to date that can point to an application and say, ‘That was a game changer,'” Stephanie Hare, an independent technology researcher, told CNBC.

Singapore, which was seen as a pioneer in the development of tracking technology, has seen around 2.1 million downloads of its application. This translates to approximately 37% of the country’s population, still well below the recommended 60% threshold. And while digital tracking measures appear to have helped in countries like China and South Korea, critics say these technologies were at the expense of privacy.

In Norway, health authorities were forced to withdraw their contact tracking application after a warning from data protection regulators. The Scandinavian country’s app was ranked alongside that of Bahrain and Kuwait in Amnesty International’s list of the “most alarming mass surveillance tools” used to track the virus. It used location data, as well as Bluetooth, and processed proximity data centrally rather than on individual smartphones.

“You are expressing yourself a lot like: either you care about human life or you care about privacy,” Raha Rasha Abdul Rahim, deputy director of Amnesty International’s technology division, told CNBC. “You can still have a useful contact tracking app that respects human rights and people’s privacy.”

France launched a tracking application that used Bluetooth to find the contacts of patients with coronavirus. But like Norway, the app did not adopt the Apple and Google model. That may have been detrimental to their success, as only 14 people out of the 1.9 million who downloaded the app received notifications to say they had been exposed to someone who was coronavirus positive. Like the UK, France also promoted the app as a key part of the country’s strategy to curb the spread of the virus.

The UK has now backed off and said it will apply Apple and Google technology to its application. The government wanted to move forward with a centralized model that stored data in a central database, but found that the application was much less effective on iPhone than on Android devices due to privacy measures imposed by Apple’s operating system. The only alternative was to succumb to the focus of the tech giants.

“There is a strange situation where they dictate the kind of privacy measures that should be put in place to trace contacts,” Abdul Rahim of Amnesty said of Apple and Google. “It is an interesting dynamic because it shows the power of the technology giants, that we finally have to rely on their goodwill to establish security protection measures.”

However, the Apple and Google model is still struggling to catch up in many countries. In the United States, only three states have openly said they will use technology companies’ software to develop their tracking applications. And so far there has been no indication of an effort to introduce technology at the federal level.

And even the Apple-Google model has its limitations. For example, it is feared that relying on Bluetooth instead of location tracking could lead to an avalanche of false positives due to detection range. Still, privacy advocates argue that it’s the best option available right now. And while app deployment around the world has been unstable so far, researchers believe it’s still worth following as a supplement to manual contact tracking.

For them to work, experts say they must be part of a broader health strategy that encompasses massive testing and stringent physical distancing measures. Germany’s app, which takes the Apple-Google approach, has shown promising signs, with 14 million people downloading it since its launch last month.

“Contact tracking apps should be part of a much broader healthcare response,” said Abdul Rahim. “That includes widespread testing and access to adequate medical care.”