READY TO LAUNCH

Time to embrace contact tracing – Adrian Weckler,

I’M going to download the new Irish contact-tracing app. Despite the delays and the data protection queries, it’s worth a try. To be sure, there are still questions and doubts. But they’re not enough to stop me giving it a go.

Last week, the Waterford-based company given the contract to design the app, Nearform, went through some of the expected “technological limitations”.

“The reality is that all these smartphones were never designed to facilitate contact tracing,” its executives said. “Bluetooth technology was not created to enable this kind of communication between devices. We came up against a wall when trying to ensure the Bluetooth signals would work even if the phone was inactive in someone’s pocket… Other problems surfaced with letting Apple and Android devices communicate seamlessly with each other.”

It is useful and refreshing to have this understood up front: the app won’t always work. Trinity College Dublin researchers have been saying as much for weeks, based on their own tests.

In particular, Professor Doug Leith and Stephen Farrell have shown that in a number of typical scenarios, the underlying technology just isn’t always accurate. They took measurements in several locations around Dublin — in a supermarket, on a train carriage, sitting at a meeting table and walking outdoors on a city street.

“When sitting around a meeting table with phones in their pockets we measured the signal strength to be very low, even for people sitting next to one another,” said Leith, who added that people would need to place their phones on the table instead.

It may even lead to a small number of ‘false positives’, which brings up the issue of privacy.

This is where the role played by Apple and Google becomes particularly interesting. Their diktat on how such app technology should work has now saved the whole system from snooping on us too much. For instance, it forbids governments to access things such as location data of users.

This is pretty ironic. Many governments (our own included) wanted a more “centralised” contact-tracing app that would give authorities more insight into exactly who was using it and their personal networks. These centralised apps, Nearform said, “could provide public health officials and epidemiologists with a view of everybody an infected person had been in contact with, where and when. They would then have a far better idea of who was infecting whom, how many people were being exposed and who any super-spreaders were. That data could be graphed and mapped to see plumes and spreads, all thanks to the app.”

This may or may not have fallen foul of data protection regulators. But it would certainly have freaked a portion of the population out. If you Google any discussion or social media thread on contact-tracing apps, you’ll find a strong undercurrent of ‘surveillance’ worries.

Even now, there is a small (vocal) cohort of individuals who say they won’t use the decentralised contact-tracing app for fear of being tracked or otherwise placed in a new data box by authorities.

But the cries of surveillance are more muted now than they were before the Google-Apple decentralised system was adopted.

While a data protection impact assessment was not available at the time of going to press with this article, and while this could still influence things, it doesn’t seem to be the urgent red flag that it was once shaping up to be.

Switzerland launched the SwissCovid contact-tracing app for its residents

There is another side to the Apple-Google app dynamic that isn’t as cheerful. Regardless of how we got here, Ireland — as well as most other EU countries now, it seems — has little choice but to base this key public health tool on the tenets of what the two tech giants have outlined.

In general, this is happening without a murmur (mostly because the technology is better and is being developed and donated for free). But is this a template for things to come? When the next emergency happens, are tech multinationals now to be a default utility option? If so, will there be a trade-off on other positions?

I have sat in on most of the major walkthroughs of the tech from Apple and Google. To be clear, no-one is suggesting that either is doing this for any other reason but to be genuinely helpful. Furthermore, their solution is demonstrably less creepy and less invasive than most of the alternatives our own politicians would have put on us. But there is still a lingering point about accountability and utility. That, though, is a column for another week.

As to the immediate prospects for the Irish app, there remain a few potential barriers to it being effective. For example, it may not work with old smartphones. If you have an iPhone 6, iPhone 5 (or 5C or 5S) or anything else older than an iPhone 7, or if you have an Android phone that used Android 5 or older, you could have problems. This is a problem, with around 10pc of Ireland’s Android phones falling into this category. It’s more so given that it may disproportionately affect older people who change their smartphones less frequently.

It also seems that it won’t initially be downloadable by phone-owners who are under 16, due to what some privacy experts claim is a total misreading of ‘digital consent’.

So those thousands of teens visiting their grandparents, going into shops or attending school may fall through the contact-tracing cracks.

But even with all that, I think it’s still worth giving this a shot. Take-up may never get to the optimal 50pc or 60pc, but most experts I’ve spoken to think that even a 25pc take-up rate could make some useful impact.

If that’s the case, and unless anything prohibitive emerges in the remaining hours before its App Store release, I can’t see a reason why I wouldn’t download and use it.