Given that most of them are modeled after Apps used by Beijing
to track their own political dissidents, are COVID 19 contact tracing apps more
trouble than their worth especially when it comes to privacy concerns?
By: Ringo Bones
COVID 19 Contact Tracing Apps have raised concerns to
everyone concerned about civil liberties. To anyone old enough to remember
those post 9/11 overarching anti-terror laws can attest to this. Add to that
most computer literate folks cite that most of them are reminiscent of secret
tracking apps used by Beijing to monitor the day-to-day movement of suspected
Uyghur political dissidents, it is easy to see why many see that COVID 18
contact tracing apps are really more trouble than their worth and has nothing
to do with keeping us from getting COVID 19 but more to do with breaching the
most basic of our privacy rights.
According to a study
published by the Brookings Institution back in April 27, 2020: Even among true
contact events, most will not lead to transmission. Studies suggest that people
have on average about a dozen close contacts a day – incidents involving direct
touch or one-on-one conversation – yet even in the absence of social distancing
measures the average infected person transmits to only 2 or 3 other people
throughout the entire course of the disease. Fleeting interactions, such as
crossing paths in a grocery store, will substantially more common and
substantially less likely to cause transmission. If the apps flag these
lower-risk encounters as well, they will cast a wide net when reporting
exposure. If they do not, they will miss a substantive fraction of transmission
events.
Because most exposures flagged by apps will not lead to
infection, many users will be instructed to self-quarantine even though they
have not been infected. A person may put up with this once or twice, but after
a few false alarms and the ensuring inconvenience of protracted self-isolation,
we expect many will start to disregard the warnings, Of course, this is a problem
with conventional contact tracing as well, but it can be managed with effective
direct communication between the contact tracer and the suspected contact.
