Contact tracing: Covid apps see scant success
Long-promised contact-tracing apps are still missing in the fight against Covid-19, said Rolfe Winkler and Patience Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. In early April, Apple and Google announced a high profile collaboration on a platform for building Bluetooth apps that could notify users if they’d come into contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus. But the technology comes with restrictive privacy safeguards that keep app makers from pinpointing where an interaction occurs, and only five states have adopted it. Instead of a unified national effort, a “kaleidoscope of apps, deployed at the state or county level,” have emerged, most of them “buggy or little-used,” and “none are ready for a major rollout.” Several apps have tried an alternative approach to mapping contacts that’s “generally accurate within 16 feet” but can “show people to be in the same spot on a map if they are a dozen floors apart in an apartment building.”
Unfortunately, the plans from Apple and Google “don’t have a prayer,” said Mike Feibus in USA Today, because people don’t trust the tech giants. One recent conspiracy theory claims that an outage on T-Mobile’s network was caused by the companies secretly “adding Covid-19 trackers to our cellphones.” No, that didn’t happen. But for many Americans it rings true, because Big Tech has so often led us to expect the worst on privacy.
Just know that America isn’t the only place flubbing its contact-tracing efforts, said Romain Dillet in TechCrunch.com. France released its StopCovid app in early June, and roughly 1.9 million people downloaded it. “But only 68 users have declared they’ve been diagnosed Covid19 positive,” and the app, which is not built on Apple-Google technology, sent only 14 notifications about possible interactions in three weeks. After months of work, the U.K. ditched its contact-tracing app over privacy concerns, said Rory Cellan-Jones in BBC.com. The initial app used a centralized model that allowed “matching to be done on a central computer.” But the app violated Apple’s and Google’s policies that bar transmitting Bluetooth data to third parties, sending the government back to the drawing board for a replacement.
So far, one of the few apps to have shown value in contact tracing is one that started to connect college football fans, said Erin Brodwin in StatNews.com. A Microsoft engineer from North Dakota designed the “Bison Tracker” app to “chart the annual migration of college football fans from North Dakota to the site of the national championship game.” A repurposed version helps North Dakotans track where they’ve been and refresh their memories if they get infected. “While apps can’t replace health-care workers, they may be used to bolster their efforts.”