Smartphone to fight virus

BRUSSELS, March 25, (AP): Several European nations are evaluating powerful but potentially intrusive tools for fighting the coronavirus pandemic, a move that could put public health at odds with individual privacy.

The tools in question are apps that would use real-time phone-location data to track the movements of virus carriers and the people they come in contact with. The aim would be to develop a better sense of where infections are flaring up, how they are spreading and when health authorities need to order quarantines and related measures to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Britain, Germany and Italy are among the nations considering the enlistment of individual location data in the fight against the virus. That worries privacy advocates, who fear such ubiquitous surveillance could be abused in the absence of careful oversight, with potentially dire consequences for civil liberties.

“These are testing times, but they do not call for untested new technologies,” a group of mostly British activists said in an open letter Monday to the country’s National Health Service. The letter noted that such measures could put human rights at risk and may not work.

Unless the data in question can be effectively anonymized, the new tools would mark a substantial departure from existing European disease-surveillance efforts, which have focused on tracking people’s movements with aggregated phone location data designed not to identify individuals. Italian police also began mobilizing drones on Monday to enforce restrictions on citizens’ movements.

But there is a powerful argument in favor of more powerful digital tools, even if they shred privacy: They have been used by several of the Asian governments most successful at containing the pandemic, including in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore.

Last week, Israel took the most extreme step yet by charging its Shin Bet domestic security agency with using smartphone location data to track the movements of virus carriers for the prior two weeks, using historical data to identify possible transmission. Epidemiologists call this process “contact tracing,” although traditionally it involves questioning newly diagnosed individuals about their contacts with others.

So far, there’s no indication the U.S. government plans to track identifiable individuals for disease surveillance. A spokesperson for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said it was not currently working on such an app. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press.

The White House has reached out to Big Tech companies for help in the worst pandemic in a century, but

ducing masks for hospitals. The hospitals provide the material to the company and Van De Velde provides the labor for free.

Lagae, 31, from Torhout in western Bel

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Google and Facebook both told the AP they are not sharing people’s location data with governments.

A Google spokesperson said the company was exploring ways to use aggregated location information against COVID-19, but added that the location data Google normally gathers from phone users isn’t accurate enough for contact tracing.

An AT&T spokesperson said the company was not sharing real-time location tracking with U.S. government virus-trackers. Sprint declined to comment and Verizon did not immediately respond to a query.

Contact-tracing apps being considered by European governments would, like Israel’s effort, go well beyond what those governments are currently getting from wireless carriers to identify “hot spots” of disease and human concentration.

While legal safeguards exist in most democracies to protect digital privacy, the danger of the coronavirus could quickly compel policymakers to override them. On Friday, the European Union’s Data Protection Authority cautiously endorsed putting privacy on pause during the public health emergency.

Italy’s Lazio region, which includes Rome and is home to 5.9 million people, rolled out a voluntary app over the weekend to assist people placed under quarantine or who think they’ve been in contact with others infected by the coronavirus. Privacy advocates worry that such apps can be used to track people. Poland has introduced a more intrusive app - its instructions say it’s voluntary - to enforce 14-day quarantine for an estimated 80,000 people.

Jens Wille, CEO of the Hamburg digital mapping company UbiLabs, developed an opt-in app prototype for contact tracing that he said German officials evaluated but chose not to adopt. Officials at the Robert Koch Institute, which is managing the country’s COVID-19 response, told the AP they did not yet have anything to say on the issue. “They are working on something,” said Wille.

The chief executive of the innovation arm of Britain’s National Health Service, Matthew Gould, said in a statement that his office was “looking at whether app-based solutions might be helpful in tracking and managing coronavirus, and we have assembled expertise from inside and outside the organisation to do this as rapidly as possible.”

In South Korea, a compulsory app enforces self-isolation for those ordered to maintain it. Anyone violating quarantine could face a $8,400 fine or up to a year in prison. Taiwan and Singapore also use smartphone apps to enforce quarantines via “electronic fences” that alert authorities when someone moves out of quarantine. Hong Kong health authorities use electronic wristbands to monitor all overseas travelers ordered into self-isolation.

gium, created her first design from scratch. Belgian medical authorities then gave her an approved design and advised her on materials to use.

She makes her masks using two layers of cotton fabric so they can be washed at 90 C (194 F) and reused, taking care to ensure the masks fit well around the nose and chin.

Each member can produce about 20 masks per day, and it isn’t only women sewing. “We have plenty of men,” she said. There is no suggested quota for members, with Lagae stressing that “every mask does count.”

“So everyone who wants to help is welcome, even if you only make one a day,” Lagae said. (AP)