SARS-CoV-2, Digital Contact Tracing, and Privacy
A lot has been written about the experience of some Asian countries in combating epidemics by way of contact tracing. This experience is based on tracing contacts of infected individuals with healthy people and on preventive lockdowns.
Contact tracing calls for well-coordinated actions on the part of many health services. A typical tracing delay reaches a day or more. Since we’re talking here about the tracing of up to ten thousand cases, this method doesn’t scale up and requires titanic effort that needs to start from the very first person who tested positive for COVID-19.
The arrival of contact tracing technology followed shortly. A lot of countries already have mobile apps for tracing the movement of people under quarantine. Coupled with video surveillance systems, these solutions raise a lot of privacy and ethical issues. Just imagine the authorities tracking your contacts with other people in near real time. This could be a throwback to an episode of the ‘Black Mirror’ series.
Events are unfolding blazingly fast. An interesting research article titled “Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing” (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb6936) was released on March 31st. This study provides the modeling of the virus spread based on assumptions and the Wuhan data.
What makes this model stand out is that its authors have split the general infectiousness coefficient into a set of vectors that can cause virus transmission. These include pre-symptomatic, symptomatic, and asymptomatic individuals as well as environmental transmission.
Source: ScienceMag
Based on these vectors, researchers created a model for contact tracing efficiency and preventive quarantine for potentially affected people.
Source: ScienceMag
Pay attention to the fourth square representing a model where contacts are traced in real time. Relying on these findings, researchers have concluded that digital contact tracing will allow to reduce disease transmission many times over. It’s quite obvious even without the model :), however, now there’s some evidence to base the reasons on.
Ten days later, Apple and Google, joined their forces (!) and issued a press release “Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology”, announcing the launch of draft APIs for anonymous digital contact tracing. In effect, once you report that you’ve been diagnosed with COVID-19, your close contacts will be immediately notified of the confirmed case.
Currently, contact tracing technology goes under the cover of “the user needs to give consent”, but there’s a high probability many world leaders and officials will promote it as a means to contain pandemics and a mandatory requirement.
On a more positive note, digital contact tracing tools for COVID-19 might literally become our lifesaver in the face of the severe virus outbreak. Technological companies now have a special role to play in protecting user privacy by applying next-gen technologies in a CCPA and GDPR-friendly way.
