Technology and contact tracing
Panel offers open questions, calls for collaboration
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has exposed faults in structural processes, communication inconsistencies, and technological gaps — surfacing discussions about how to improve these structural failings and mitigate the pandemic. Contact tracing, defined by the World Health Organization as “identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission,” has touched on all of these issues.
A recent panel on “Contact tracing: what it is, how it works, how tech can help,” offered critical insight into the important questions that need to be asked during the pandemic. The panel was the first session of a webinar on contact tracing and technology hosted by TechCrunch, NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, Betaworks Studios, Hangar, and the Berkman Klein Center.
“What we’ve been trying to do is to marshal the firepower towards the particular gap and understanding that often seems to exist between public health authorities and the tech industry,” explained Andrew McLaughlin, President and Chief Operating Officer of NewCo and moderator of the panel. “In this case, we’ve been trying to help public health authorities understand how to make sense out of all the tech that’s been thrown at them, and to help tech companies understand the needs of public health authorities and how they can plug in most usefully.”
The panel convened experts from technology and public health sectors and proposed open questions for technologists and other stakeholders who are engaging in tech and contact tracing.
“Contact tracing is a tool that clearly needs modernization, and this current unfolding of a global pandemic is an opportunity for us to do that,” said Peggy Hamburg, the Foreign Secretary of the National Academy of Medicine “but we shouldn’t abandon the core principles and strategy of contact tracing, which is as rapidly as possible to identify those who are infected.”
Contact tracing, the panelists describe, consists of identifying individuals with COVID-19, figuring out who that individual has been in contact with, and suggesting either quarantine or isolation. Both Hamburg and Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH of the Harvard Kennedy School, emphasized the compassion and humanity in this process. “There really is the need for profound caregiving,” Bourdeaux said.
“I think that when we bring these two partners together, the tech and digital communities with the public health communities, my hope is that the tech folks will come to this with a sense of humility that there’s a lot of history here, there is a lot of experience in public health, that they need to understand and partner with us,” she said. “On the public health side, I’m hoping that folks will be very generous in spirit. It’s really wonderful to have folks excited about building public health, and excited about investing in it. It’s important that we embrace that enthusiasm and try to involve folks in a way that is positive.”
Combining the need for human-driven and serving technology poses a “Human-Computer Interaction” problem, said Mary L. Gray, a faculty associate at BKC and Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. But, she underscored, the current technological response to COVID-19 “is perpetuating systemic racism in healthcare.”
“The technologies we could be building that have yet to [be] built — literally we have not built these yet — are the ones that look at the very specific practices of people who are doing the healthcare work, and really innovate in, what does that user experience of using those technologies look like? What are the kinds of information sharing that are going to be privacy protecting?” she said. “We need to have those in place so that different institutions that are sharing information across their institutional borders, private, public partnerships, can really share information and not have it leak.”
Mona Sloane echoed this sentiment, drawing on a report on Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech, to pose additional open questions for consideration: “Who is at the table, what kinds of conversations are we having, what notion of community do we actually deploy? Are we actually thinking about community as a problem? Are we thinking about community as a resource? Are we thinking about it in sufficiently complex and supportive ways? What are the kinds of infrastructures that are in place to support community? Who does the maintenance and pace for us? What happens if we quantify the problem? What kinds of languages do we develop as part of that, in terms of talking about a problem? Are we using numbers to hide political agendas, or are we using numbers to flag political problems?”
BKC Director Jonathan Zittrain concluded the session with reflections on which problems with COVID-19 contact tracing are old ones, and which challenges are new, reflecting on Esther Dyson’s dictum to “always make new mistakes.” “I think here it’s helpful to really sort between, in this area, what are old mistakes and what are new ones,” he said.
Whereas data privacy has a more “standardized” history, those processes don’t exist yet for contact tracing. “In the category of new mistakes, I think that contact tracing, in particular, offers up many avenues for new ones because of what’s come up in the discussion so far about how much this is not just a tech problem,” he said.
One new challenge he raised is the “opt in” standard for any of the digital contact tracing data collection programs in contemplation. Instead, Zittrain proposed a “retrospective opt in,” where if an individual tests positive for COVID-19, they could access — or even share — location data already anticipatorily collected on (and only on) their smartphone for use in contact tracing. Otherwise, many people will be confronting their desire to help in contact tracing at the moment they test positive — which is one or two weeks after they would have wanted to opt-in to a digital contract tracing program.
