COVID 19 Contact Tracing Apps: More Trouble Than Their Worth?

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.