By B.N. Frank
Experts continue to warn about the privacy risks and violations
associated with apps and other invasive technology being
implemented for COVID-19 (see
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6) some of which has been reported as
being dangerous and/or not effective.
In May, MIT Technology Review provided a list of virus tracking
apps. Of course there may be more by now.
From
MIT:
A flood of coronavirus apps are tracking us. Now it’s
time to keep track of them.
There’s a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure,
often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project
will document them.
by Patrick
Howell O’Neill, Tate
Ryan-Mosley , Bobbie
Johnson
As the covid-19 pandemic rages, technologists everywhere have
been rushing to build apps, services, and systems for contact
tracing: identifying and notifying all those who come in contact
with a carrier. Some are lightweight and temporary, while others
are pervasive and invasive: China’s system, for example, sucks up
data including citizens’ identity, location, and even online
payment history so that local police can watch for those who break
quarantine rules.
Some services are being produced locally by small groups of
coders, while others are vast, global operations.
Apple and Google are mobilizing huge teams to build their
upcoming systems that notify people of potential exposure, which
could be used by hundreds of millions of people almost
immediately.
Opinions differ on whether these apps are just a technocratic
daydream or—if done correctly—a potentially
useful supplement to manual tracing, in which human workers
interview people who’ve been diagnosed with covid-19 and then
track down their recent contacts. But the reality is that these
services are already rolling out, and many more are likely to come
in the next few months.
Despite the avalanche of services, however, we know very little
about them or how they could affect society. How many people will
download and use them, and how widely used do they have to be in
order to succeed? What data will they collect, and who is it shared
with? How will that information be used in the future? Are there
policies in place to prevent abuse?
We started asking these questions and found that there
were not always clear answers.�
When we began comparing apps around the world, we realized there
was no central repository of information; just incomplete,
constantly changing data spread across a wide range of sources. Nor
was there a single, standard approach being taken by developers and
policymakers: citizens of different countries were seeing radically
different levels of surveillance and transparency.
So to help monitor this fast-evolving situation, we’re
gathering the information into a single place for the first time
with our Covid Tracing Tracker—a database to
capture details of every significant automated contact tracing
effort around the world.
We’ve been working with a range of experts to understand what
we need to look at, pulling sources including government documents,
announcements, and media reports, as well as talking directly to
those who are making these apps to understand the technologies and
policies involved.
Here’s the first version of that
database.
So far we have documented 25 individual, significant automated
contact tracing efforts globally, including details on what they
are, how they work, and what policies and processes have been put
in place around them.
So far we have documented 25 individual, significant automated
contact tracing efforts globally, including details on what they
are, how they work, and what policies and processes have been put
in place around them.
We’re asking for your help to monitor and improve this
database so that the development, rollout, and evolution
of these services can be tracked over time. (See “How to submit a
change†below.)
But first, there are a lot of caveats and details to run
through. Our tracking effort is a continuous work in progress.
Information is constantly changing, and will continue to shift as
more apps become available, greater scrutiny is applied to these
initiatives, tracing efforts spread, and the pandemic continues. So
here is more information on what we’re looking at.
What the Covid Tracing Tracker contains
At the most basic level, we are compiling a list of
automated contact tracing apps that are
backed by national governments. These are apps
designed to automatically tell users or public health officials
whether somebody has potentially been exposed to covid-19; it’s
what is generally known as “exposure notification.â€
For each one we find, there are basic questions to answer:
Who is producing it? Is it released yet? Where
will it be available, and on what platforms? What
technologies does it use? And then, over time, we will
also understand more about how each of these services works in
practice, such as how many people have downloaded it and
what level of penetration it has achieved.
But then there are more complicated issues. Is it mandatory? How
private is the app? Are citizens’ rights being safeguarded? How
transparent are the makers about their work? To capture this
information, guided by principles
put forward by the American Civil Liberties Union and others,
we asked five questions.
-
Is it voluntary? In some cases, apps are
opt-in—but in other places many or all citizens are compelled to
download and use them. -
Are there limitations on how the data gets
used? Data may sometimes be used for purposes other than
public health, such as law enforcement—and that may last longer
than covid-19. -
Will data be destroyed after a period of time?
The data the apps collect should not last forever. If it is
automatically deleted in a reasonable amount of time (usually a
maximum of around 30 days) or the app allows users to manually
delete their own data, we award a star. -
Is data collection minimized? Does the app
collect only the information it needs to do what it says? -
Is the effort transparent? Transparency can
take the form of clear, publicly available policies and design, an
open-source code base, or all of these.
For each question, if we can answer yes , the app gets a star.
If we cannot answer yes—either because the answer is negative or
because it is unknown—the rating is left blank. There’s also a
field for notes that can help put things in context.
In addition, we say something about the basic technology
underlying the app. Here’s an explanation of the key terms.
-
Location: Some apps identify a person’s
contacts by tracking the phone’s movements (for instance, using
GPS or triangulation from nearby cell towers) and looking for other
phones that have spent time in the same location. -
Bluetooth: Some systems use “proximity
tracking,†in which phones swap encrypted tokens with any other
nearby phones over Bluetooth. It is easier to anonymize and
generally considered better for privacy than location
tracking. -
Google/Apple: Many apps will rely on the joint
API that Apple and Google are developing. It lets iOS and Android
phones communicate with each other over Bluetooth, allowing
developers to build a contact tracing app that will work for both.
Later the two companies plan to build this directly into their
operating systems. -
DP-3T: This stands for decentralized
privacy-preserving proximity tracing. It’s an open-source
protocol for Bluetooth-based tracking in which an individual
phone’s contact logs are only stored locally, so no central
authority can know who has been exposed.
We may expand these categories over time, at which point this
article will be revised.
What the database doesn’t contain
First, we are focused on automated contact tracing
apps that the public is already using or will use in the
near future. That means we aren’t keeping track of the underlying
protocols that will feed into apps (this is why the Google/Apple
API itself isn’t on the list), or early-stage initiatives to
build new products, or experimental apps that have no government
backing or connection to public health services. Our initial search
found more than 150 of these preliminary efforts, but many have no
have clear pathway to being used by the public. As projects evolve
into real products, we will add them to our list.
Second, although the interaction between manual contact tracing
efforts and automated systems will be critical, we aren’t
monitoring manual efforts at this time.
Finally, the database isn’t a recommendation on
whether to download an app or not. It’s intended to
bring you data that helps you make an informed decision on whether
to use a service, and on whether to seek changes in your
government’s approach.
Keeping eyes on all this information is going to require
constant effort—the facts continue to evolve, the numbers change,
and policies may or may not be adhered to. We may discover that
what happens in theory is different from what happens in practice,
or that what was promised does not end up being delivered.
So we’re asking for your help.
How to access the database
The most accessible version of the database exists on the page
you are reading right now, and on
Flourish, a data visualization service. A public version of the
underlying data is kept in
this read-only spreadsheet, which we update once a day at 6
p.m. US Eastern Time.
How to submit a change
If you have an update, correction, or addition to the tracker,
please email the relevant information to us at
[email protected]. Please reference original sources for
your claim: government or developer announcements, verifiable news
sources, or published research.
There is a separate page detailing this here.
Further reading
If you’d like to know more about automated contact tracing and
exposure notification, here are a few relevant papers and
documents.
Outpacing
the Virus: Digital Response to Containing the Spread of COVID-19
while Mitigating Privacy Risks (Harvard Center for Ethics)
COVID-19 Rapid Evidence Review: Exit through the App Store?
(Ada Lovelace Institute)
Contact Tracing
Mobile Apps for COVID-19: Privacy Considerations and Related
Trade-offs (Cho, Ippolito, Yu)
PACT: Private Automated Contact
Tracing (MIT)
Some people may be comforted by the constant tracking. But what
about the constant radiation exposure? Last year, the
World Health Organization warned that exposure to high levels
of
Electromagnetic Fields (aka “Electrosmogâ€)
could cause health issues in a significant percentage of the
population. Sources include all wireless technology – activity
trackers (see
1,
2),
cell phones, utility
“Smart†Meters, etc.
Research has determined that wireless exposure can compromise
respiratory health as well as
reduce immunity to viruses as well as
- cause
hair loss - cause
rashes, other
skin irritations, and
premature skin aging - cause and/or increase
blood sugar fluctuations - cause and/or increase
cardiac health issues - cause and/or increase
insomnia - disrupt the blood-brain barrier (see
1,
2,
3) - increase cancer risk (see
1,
2,
3,
4) - increase risk for
“Microwave Sicknessâ€, Electromagnetic Sensitivity and
Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity - and MORE
This being the case – reducing your exposure (and your loved
ones’ exposure) to wireless radiation seems to be a step in the
right direction of reducing your vulnerability to viruses like
COVID-19.
Activist Post reports regularly about unsafe technology. For
more information, visit our
archives and the following websites:
- Electromagnetic Radiation
Safety - Environmental Health
Trust - Physicians for Safe
Technology - Wireless Information
Network - Whatis5G.info
Subscribe
to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Send
resources to the front lines of peace and freedom HERE! Follow us on
SoMee,
HIVE, Parler, Flote, Minds, MeWe and Twitter.
Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming!
Get a free issue of Counter
Markets today.
