The CDC director says very aggressive contact tracing will be required to scale back the current measures to contain the spread of COVID-19. Even as isolated as I’ve been, if I came down with symptoms today, I wouldn’t be able to remember everyone I’ve potentially exposed in the past two weeks. Researchers studying the alarming infection rate of the novel coronavirus suggest that epidemiologists shouldn’t rely on our faulty memories, but get data from our smartphones instead.
- MIT develops privacy-preserving COVID-19 contact tracing insprired by Apple’s ‘Find My’ feature [Tech Crunch] “MIT researchers have devised a new method to would provide automated contact tracing that taps into the Bluetooth signals sent out by everyone’s mobile devices, tying contacts to random numbers that aren’t linked to an individual’s identity in any way.
- Apple and Google detail bold and ambitious plan to track COVID-19 at scale [Ars Technica] “In the event someone reports to the system that she has tested positive, her phone will contact a central server and upload 14 days of her identifiers. Non-infected users download daily tracing keys… The scheme is similar to the way raffle tickets work, with one party getting half of a paper ticket, the other party getting the other half, and—in theory at least—no one else being the wiser.”
- As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets [New York Times] “Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later.”
- Fighting Covid-19 Shouldn’t Mean Abandoning Human Rights [Wired] “Surveillance programs should have unambiguous sunset clauses so that they cannot continue once the pandemic ends. Information collected during the outbreak should be firewalled from other governmental or commercial uses and then should generally be destroyed after the virus is brought under control.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Yasaka, Tyler M., et al. “Peer-to-Peer Contact Tracing: Development of a Privacy-Preserving Smartphone App.” JMIR mHealth and uHealth, vol. 8, no. 4, Apr. 2020, p. e18936.
- “Creating the Coronopticon: Surveillance through Apps and Data Networks Can Do Much to Keep Covid-19 at Bay, but at What Cost?” Economist, vol. 434, no. 9187, Mar. 2020, p. 12.
- He, Zhenjian. “What Further Should Be Done to Control COVID-19 Outbreaks in Addition to Cases Isolation and Contact Tracing Measures?” BMC Medicine, vol. 18, no. 1, Mar. 2020, p. 80.
