The Flawed World of Contact Tracing: Where’s Carol The Tester?

Governments love quick fixes … “We have an app, and we are working with Google, so everything will be okay!”

I must admit, the specification created by Apple and Google on contact tracing is a massive disappointment, and leaves so many doors open to large scale surveillance. I appreciate that they are laying down a basic mechanism that lands on the phone, but there’s no real privacy embedded into their system, and no hints to how this could be used in the real world.

The whole discussion on user and contact tracing opens up a whole lot of questions, and the most fundamental of these is that we don’t actually have any real infrastructure to implement privacy-preserving methods. It is likely that a COVID-19 app would be a pin-point app, and where the data gathered for location and contact tracking could be easily abused, and would have limited scope outside a country’s borders. Our core problem is that we have built data infrastructures that mirror those from the 1980s, and where we care little about the core rights of the data we gather. Once captured, the owner becomes the entity who captured the data, and without the trustworthiness of the transactions involved, we leave it open to abuse for malicious activities.