COVID Trace is one of the latest app-based solutions hoping to help monitor and track the spread of coronavirus. Over the past few weeks, smartphones have become an increasingly relied upon tool, raising further concerns over privacy and user data. COVID Trace hopes to overcome that hurdle, albeit at a cost to performance.
Coronavirus is spreading, and fast. While governments and tech companies work on solutions to help treat existing coronavirus patients, finding ways to track the spread to avoid new patients emerging becomes increasingly harder. So difficult that many are now viewing smartphones as the default solution, due to their ability to pinpoint a location, and in conjunction to the location of other smartphones.
There have already been multiple reports of smartphones in use for tracking and monitoring and the latest app to join the collective is the COVID Trace app. This one is said to have been developed by former Google and Uber engineers who “decided to drop everything and concentrate” on stemming the virus outbreak. The app is not yet available to download from the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store, although the developers expect that to change soon.
COVID Trace Claims To Focus On Privacy
At the superficial level, this is just another contact tracing app. As such, COVID Trace will not stop you from coming into contact with someone infected with coronavirus, nor will it even give prior warning that contact is likely to happen. Instead, the app will send you an alert each time that it suspects you may have come into contact with someone with coronavirus during the last hour. Due to the lengthy time-frame, this could essentially mean you will be alerted when you visit a place where someone who had coronavirus visited up to an hour before. In addition, the developers note the app tends to favor false positives over false negatives, which means you are likely to receive alerts when no exposure took place.
As part of the announcement, the developers behind COVID Trace make it abundantly clear that privacy is something that’s been incorporated into the app experience at the build level. For example, the app apparently won’t store any data related to your home, including interactions that take place at home. Similarly, even when an alert is received, the developers state the app won’t alert anyone else unless the device owner manually opts to “send a report” to the team. Further adding to its privacy-focused nature, the developers also explain that the app doesn't include third-party tracking ("unless needed") or any advertising.
It is clear by the language and tone of the announcement that the developers are keen to position this as a privacy-aware app. While that’s good, the developers do note that privacy and accurate contract tracing “are in conflict with one another” which perfectly highlights the issue here. In providing a privacy-minded solution, the app relies heavily on users actively offering the data and if they don’t, then the use of the app decreases accordingly. In other words, it is not only up to the user to decide if privacy matters more than helping a tool that might slow the spread, but also every other user making the exact same decision, and submitting their own data. Only then might the app be useful in helping to slow down coronavirus.
Source: COVID Trace