Last updated on November 24, 2020
Last month, we covered plans by Apple and Google to build contact-tracing capabilities into phones. These new exposure-notification tools were released last Wednesday, allowing for regional health authorities to develop and release apps that will assist them in combating the spread of the COVID-19. The debate rages on to seek a balance between effectively slowing the pandemic and protecting citizen privacy.
- The technologies the world is using to track coronavirus — and people [VentureBeat] “Governments are quickly deploying their own cocktails of tracking methods, including device-based contact tracing, wearables, thermal scanning, drones, and facial recognition technology.”
- The Case For Contact Tracing Apps Built On Apple And Google’s Exposure Notification System [TechDirt] “Traditional physical contact tracing involves public health officials interviewing infected patients and their recent contacts, collecting that information in centralized government databases, and connecting real identities to contacts. The Google-Apple exposure notification system clearly outperforms traditional approaches on privacy grounds.”
- How South Korea turned an urban planning system into a virus tracking database [Reuters] “The Epidemic Investigation Support System (EISS) merges advanced methods of collecting information and tracking the virus into a new data sharing system that patches together cellphone location data and credit card records.”
- One of the first contact-tracing apps violates its own privacy policy [Washington Post] “Care19 sends data to Foursquare including a citizen’s location, his advertising identifier (a unique code representing a specific phone) and the unique ‘citizen code’ generated by the app.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Albergotti, Reed. “Apple and Google Launch ‘Exposure Notification’ Tool to Aid Contact Tracing.” Washington Post, The, 2020 Winter 5AD.
- Gurman, Mark, and Gerrit De Vynck. “Apple, Google’s Covid-19 Tool Gives Health Authorities More Data.” Bloomberg.Com, May 2020, p. N.PAG.
- O’Halloran, Joe. “UK Contact-Tracing App Developers Hit Back at Effectiveness and Privacy Doubts: Pre-Eminent Scientists Continue to Defend the NHS’s Coronavirus Contact-Tracing App against Criticism over Its Effectiveness and Use of Centralised Data Gathering.” Computer Weekly, May 2020, pp. 4–7.
