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The world is racing to restrict the spread of COVID-19 using contact tracing apps. But do these apps adhere to privacy concerns?

In the time of COVID-19 pandemonium, humankind is familiar with epidemiological words like social distancing, lockdown, and others. One of the emerging terms is contact tracing technology. With COVID-19 having claimed about 482,200 lives and triggering severe economic ramifications, this technology can help have a tad bit of control on the situation. Different nations have adopted a range of different policies to combat this unprecedented phenomenon. But contact tracing is a common strategy employed by almost every country to mitigate the situation.

What is contact tracing?

According to George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California-San Francisco, says, “Contact tracing has been around since the 1930s as a way to track the spread of diseases.” It is since used by government health agencies to identify people who may have been exposed to health threats.  This threat can be either through direct contact with a person with the disease or with someone who has been near that person. The aim of this technology is to identify and help in limiting the spread of an epidemic or pandemic. Therefore, contact tracing has been credited for the role it played in helping to lift restrictions in several nations. It assisted governments in learning when it would be safe to reopen public places, institutions, and companies. Another outcome of contact tracing is to influence public health policies through the study of contamination chains.

Contact tracing was used during the Ebola virus outbreak of 2014 and in the 2003 SARS outbreak. It’s also used to combat sexually transmitted infections and other communicable diseases like tuberculosis. And as COVID-19 has gone global, many countries did not hesitate before enforcing this technology.

How does it help?

When someone gets infected or discovers to have been tested positive for the disease, they inform authorities about it generally through an app. Then the investigators, like doctors, nurses, other healthcare officials, collect information to track down others who might have been in recent contact with over a specified amount of time, usually about an eight-day window before and after when they started exhibiting symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define “contact” in this instance as occurring at a distance of six feet or less, for ten or more minutes.

Healthcare officials then make an effort to reach out to every one of those contacts, inform them of possible exposure, advise them to self-quarantine, and recommend follow-up medical care if they are at risk or start exhibiting symptoms. That may include telling them about possible symptoms or directing them to self-isolate, which is for 14 days in the case of COVID-19. All these measures significantly help in slowing community spread.

Furthermore, using these databases and analytics tools, machine learning can help predict how the infected network can impact the area by building analytical models that reflect real-world data and conditions. Through data visualization and data analytics, healthcare officials can alert the government about emerging developments. These can be the number of people that need to be tested immediately and hence require more test kits, the direction of virus spread, at-risk communities, among many other applications. These go in a long way in empowering concerned authorities to act faster and alert people in “red zones.”

Privacy Concerns:

Although Apple and Google have jointly come up with an app to aid in contact tracing, many country governments have started their own versions of such apps. On March 20, Singapore was among the first to launch a contact-tracing app ‘TraceTogether.’ The state described it as a supplementary tool for its contact tracing efforts that relied on the recall and memory of infected individuals. The app tracks Bluetooth handshakes, and data is crunched securely on each individual’s phone, making it a precursor to the Apple and Google plan. If a user is diagnosed with COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, they could allow Singapore’s health ministry to access their app data to identify people who had close contact with the infected individual.

Iceland’s app, called Rakning C-19, uses smartphone location data, which must be enabled at all times to work. Once set up, the app runs in the background and saves the phone’s location several times per hour, storing the data on the phone itself and deleting it after 14 days.

The UK’s National Health Service is building its own app that will store information centrally so virus trackers can have more information to work on. NHS has opted for a centralized model so that it can adapt faster as more data about the virus is accumulated. However, it will naturally need to go to substantial lengths to ensure this remains secure. It also has not ruled out moving towards a decentralized model in the future.

Even though different nations have approached contact tracing in their way and necessity, but not all are concerned about privacy or data security. Singapore’s ‘TraceTogether’ does not collect personal details such as a user’s name nor record location data or access the user’s phone contact list. Even UK promised to keep location data anonymous. Exposure Notification, the brain child of Apple-Google, keeps all of the information on an individual’s phone and isn’t passed to a central database, thus helping to protect privacy.

But In India, contact tracing app AarogyaSetu sparked huge outrage against lack of privacy and location tracking. Germany, too switched to a decentralized approach after massive criticism.

The public health policies must strike a balance between the right to data privacy and the necessity for establishing a clear public safety policy even in case of a deadly pandemic like COVID-19. Additionally, policymakers need to address issues related to cybersecurity to prevent the leakage of personal data on the internet, to avoid the spread of misinformation and fake news that can disrupt government efforts to control the pandemic. Providing information to other citizens about patients can be hugely problematic because it not only breaches medical confidentiality but also has the potential to fuel stigma towards diagnosed patients.