Alan O’Connor
In the Coronavirus Pandemic a small number of governments have introduced contact tracing using mobile-phone apps.
Big-tech companies rushed to develop apps as a “quick fix” for a complex socio-medical crisis.
Why is this a problem?
(1) Many doctors have spoken out against these apps because they violate civil liberties. Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, has spoken out against them. The WHO does support an app that gives people reliable information about the outbreak.
Dr David Fisman, an epidemiologist and practicing doctor in Toronto also spoke out against contact tracing apps because they violate civil liberties. In an interview on CBC Radio on April 14, 2020 he pointed out that social distancing in Toronto is working well and contact tracing does not help with the crisis in nursing homes. What is needed is testing for the virus, which has not been widely available in Ontario.
CBC News medical contributor and family physician Dr. Peter Lin suggests keeping a written diary of contacts: Tuesday 10am, shopped at Green Veggies Store; Friday 4pm, bought gas at neighbourhood gas station.
(2) Public Health measures work best when authorities win the trust of the population. In the SARS outbreak in Toronto the vast majority of people willingly co-operated with authorities; the small number of people who hesitated were often won over by persuasion. Forcing people to give up basic freedoms erodes trust.
(3) The technical quick-fix hides the cut-backs to Public Health budgets. In the name of small government, Donald Trump reduced budgets for public health. To “save the taxpayers money” the Ontario Government of Doug Ford slashed public-health spending. Mobile phone apps are no substitute for replacing the budgets of Public Health organizations.
(4) Dealing with the Coronavirus crisis requires many different interventions. For example, in Africa large amounts of food will be required to prevent mass starvation. A contact-tracing app doesn’t improve pay and conditions for nurses or personal care assistants in nursing homes.
(5) The Apps are being pushed by big-tech companies that are in the business of collecting and exploiting personal data. Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism. Facebook is notorious for pushing the privacy boundaries of its users. When people realize and protest, Facebook apologies and then continues much as before. This is because the business models of Facebook, Google and Twitter are all based on exploiting user data. Many people say they don’t mind the loss of privacy because they have nothing to hide, but the activities of Black Rights, feminist, gay, anti-war, and even marijuana activists have all been considered illegal in the past. We have the right to live our lives without everything we do being recorded.
(6) Police have pressured to get confidential data in the past. It is said that the data collected for Coronavirus contact tracing will only be used for this purposes. But there are many examples of the police attempting to force tech companies to break into encrypted data, and using mobile-phone tower data to contact hundreds of people who happened to be in the vicinity of a serious crime. We give our police enormous powers to solve crimes, but this must be balanced by basic civil liberties. On April 6, 2020 it was announced that police in Ontario have access to a data base of people who test positive for Covid-19. This order makes little sense because we now know that many people who carry the virus have few or no symptoms. Yet the order is apparently still in effect. https://news.ontario.ca/mcscs/en/2020/04/ontario-takes-additional-measures-to-protect-first-responders-during-the-covid-19-outbreak.html
(7) Many of the apps don’t work very well. For example, an app that depends on a car driver punching their destination into Google maps does not seems very effective. Can the app tell that I am actually separated by a closed glass window from a person who has Covid-19? An app that only records contacts of 30 minutes or longer seems to be using an arbitrary cut-off (the virus could be transmitted by a 2-minute interaction). Apps that send warnings to people that they are in an area where someone with Covid-19 has been in the past two weeks, send eight or nine notifications per day—people find them annoying and ignore the information.
Sam Biddle, THE INVENTORS OF BLUETOOTH SAY THERE COULD BE PROBLEMS USING THEIR TECH FOR CORONAVIRUS CONTACT TRACING, The Intercept, May 5, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-bluetooth-contact-tracing/
(8) Stop the panic. The Coronavirus Pandemic is not a five-week nuisance. The Pandemic will change society in the same way as a World War. It is important that we do not allow temporary emergency measures to become permanent controls in a future world dominated by authoritarian governments that work closely with a small number of powerful corporations: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon.
References
Caroline Haskins, Utah’s Contact Tracing App Was Supposed To Help The State Open Up. It Isn’t Going Very Well. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/utah-spent-millions-contact-tracing-app-covid-19-coronavirus
Paul Lewis, UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response, The Guardian, April 12, 2020.
Matt Phillips, Investors Bet Giant Companies Will Dominate After Crisis, New York Times, April 28, 2020.
Paul Lewis and David Pegg, Google executive took part in Sage meeting, tech firm confirms, The Guardian, April 30, 2020. Representative from Google invited to participate in UK government advisory group.
Naomi Klein, Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High Tech Dystopia, The Intercept, May 8, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/
Ieva Ilves, Why are Google and Apple dictating how European democracies fight coronavirus? The Guardian, June 16, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/google-apple-dictating-european-democracies-coronavirus
David Nield, How Apple and Google’s Social Distancing Maps Work, Wired, April 19, 2020.
Andrew Roth and others, Growth in surveillance may be hard to scale back after pandemic, experts say, The Guardian, April 14, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/growth-in-surveillance-may-be-hard-to-scale-back-after-coronavirus-pandemic-experts-say
Raymond Zhong, China’s Virus Apps May Outlast the Outbreak, Stirring Privacy Fears, New York Times, May 26, 2020.
Helen Davidson, Chinese city plans to turn coronavirus app into permanent health tracker, The Guardian, May 26, 2020.
Debjani Bhattacharyya and Banu Subramaniam, Technofascism in India: An ostensible public health tool is being used to create ghettos of the sick. https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/technofascism-in-india/
India is forcing people to use its covid app, unlike any other democracy: Millions of Indians have no choice but to download the country’s tracking technology if they want to keep their jobs, MIT Technology Review, May 7, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/07/1001360/india-aarogya-setu-covid-app-mandatory/
Global News report with response from Canadian Civil Liberties Association: https://globalnews.ca/news/6772753/tech-companies-canada-phone-apps-tracking-coronavirus-spread/
CBC The Sunday Edition: Interview with Brenda McPhail, Canadian Civil Liberties Association: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/contact-tracing-for-covid-19-risks-erasing-civil-liberties-says-expert-1.5532117
CCLA statement on proposals for mobile phone tracing: https://thelogic.co/news/canadian-civil-liberties-association-calls-for-safeguards-in-data-based-covid-19-contact-tracing/
Rob Lucas, Review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Online at: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism (VPRO Documentary): https://vimeo.com/385274374
Alex Hern, Apple whistleblower goes public over ‘lack of action’ – Thomas le Bonniec says firm violating rights and continues massive collection of data, The Guardian, May 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/20/apple-whistleblower-goes-public-over-lack-of-action
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 