Contact Tracing Apps and Their Privacy Concerns by Colin Asher

While the world is scrambling to control the spread of COVID-19, a new technological system of contact tracing wants to harness your smartphone to keep infections down. But this method has become the subject avg internet security avg.com/retail   of much discussion avg antivirus free and controversy. Is this the solution to our problems www.avg.com/activate, or just a way to get some whole new ones?

What is contact tracing?

Contact tracing is a method used to track the spread of a disease as it moves from person to person. The practice of contact tracing isn’t new, and is generally an effective tool to mitigate disease spread by figuring out Install Avg With License Number activation  who an infected person has come in contact with. In an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19, the technosphere has proposed a method of leveraging our ever-present smartphones to track who we’ve crossed avg internet security paths with. However, such an approach to contact tracing may be both helping and hurting as avg antivirus free it spreads a viral surveillance that could www.avg.com/activate become the new normal. This extraordinary health crisis is now also a watershed moment for the future of our privacy.

What are the origins of contact tracing?

Contact tracing arose in different forms before the shape it’s taking today with smartphone apps. Syndromic surrvillance picked up steam on a government level with the Anthrax scares of 2001. Then the 2002-2004 outbreak of the SARS virus solidified the need. Early methods of contact tracing consisted of tracking spikes in hospital visits where patients had reported similar symptoms to those of the disease avg.com/retail  , and then comparing the data from different hospitals. Today, thanks to the technology that everyone has in their pockets, the people who track diseases are looking for a more direct, elegant solution.

How contract tracing apps work

The general idea behind contact tracing mobile apps is that they notify you on your smartphone if you’ve crossed paths with someone who has indicated in the app that they have the virus. In most non-surveillance Install Avg With License Number activation  states avg internet security, this involves a person willingly uploading their infected status into their mobile app. Users will then be notified if they previously crossed paths with a person who identified as infected.

Will they actually work?

One of the key conditions for such a proximity app to be effective is its adoption by a sufficiently large number of people. While on one hand it’s nice that people in many countries can select for privacy with multiple app options, the more competing apps there are, the more the system will be fragmented. This in turn will make them all less encompassing and effective. Experts say a contact tracing app needs adoption by  at least 80% of a country in order to be really effective, and that avg.com/retail   is an essentially impossible percentage to reach, especially when people have different avg internet security options and so many differing opinions about privacy. Another often www.avg.com/activate unmentioned elephant in the room: if there aren’t enough COVID-19 tests, then the apps are pointless. They only make sense if people have a legitimate way of testing for the disease.

Development of apps

Currently, mobile apps are quickly being developed individually within many countries. Because they are being created ad hoc, many of them have much room for improvement. For example, depending on how the privacy factor is taken into account, they differ in their tracing methods and their efficacy. 

In a prominent move, tech giants Google and Applehave teamed up to create a contact tracing API. This is not an actual app, but rather Install Avg With License Number activation  an interface avg antivirus free for the contact tracing apps of different countries to be avg internet security built upon, which should help standardize the functionality of any apps created using this technology.

The Google-Apple API

Most remarkably, the Google apple effort has put privacy measures front and center, at least when compared to other methods of contact tracing. 

Part of the security measures of Google-Apple’s system is that it is decentralized, so location won't be  in a big monitorable or breachable database avg.com/retail  . That means apps can be built on top of this system and won’t send data back to the government or the companies, but will instead store anonymous data directly on the phones. The API makes use of Bluetooth signals between phones, which should be sensitive enough to measure whether you were close enough to someone to have been www.avg.com/activate exposed to the virus. This is more accurate than general location tracing, which uses GPS and can’t discern avg antivirus free distances accurately enough to measure contact. As opposed to GPS, Bluetooth can be implemented to track merely how close you were to someone at some point, not your actual location when it happened. 

With Bluetooth, if you get closer than two meters (six feet) from someone else with the app, your devices will exchange anonymous identifiers to create a list of people you’ve come in contact with that is stored on your phone. Unlike the aforementioned older methods of contact tracing where health organizations compared patient records, keeping the data on users’ phones will ensure privacy, but also prevent detailed collection and analysis by health authorities.

Varying technology and privacy around the world

Depending on the app and the technology it’s built on, the privacy of smartphone contact tracing does vary rather significantly. Let’s take a look avg internet security at some avg antivirus free different approaches and how they avg.com/retail   have been implemented around the globe.

» The USA

The fragmentation of opinion about the apps can be seen greatly in America According to survey two-thirds of Americans would install a contact tracing app, but most of that group was leery of installing an app produced by a central authority like the Center for Disease Control or, particularly, the government. Some states like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah have taken it upon themselves to develop apps avg antivirus free. On one side are  those who maintain a cautious position. Install Avg With License Number activation  On the other www.avg.com/activate are people like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who, as Silicon Valley’s unofficial commander-in-chief, supports community survelliance. At this point, the size of the United States is proving the biggest hurdle to contact tracing being implemented and working.

» The UK

The UK has chosen not to use the Google-Apple interface, and has opted instead for a centralized system that collects all the location data into avg internet security a database controlled by the National Health Service. But besides this more authoritarian data-collection, their app may not even work correctly, because it adheres to different avg antivirus free Bluetooth functionality than Google-Apple’s system. This is why many countries have entry to use the G-A system. And since the NHS can’t update smartphone operating systems like those companies can, well, they may be losing this particular game of Tech Monopoly.

» Israel

Less secure methods are, for example, a contact tracing system in Israel. The system was created by the disreputable NSO group, a mobile spyware company that was implicated in the death of journalist Jamal Kashoggi and was also www.avg.com/activate sued avg antivirus free for  by no less Install Avg With License Number activation  than the Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Their system capitalizes avg.com/retail   on a new coronavirus-inspired law passed in Israel which allows the government to makebulk collection of people’s cell phone data.