[LINK] Europe rolls out contact tracing apps

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Europe rolls out contact tracing apps
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/europe-rolls-out-contact-tracing-apps-20200617-p553bp.html
By Jason Horowitz and Adam Satariano
June 17, 2020 — 12.11pm

Rome: When three people in the northern Italian region of Liguria tested
positive for the coronavirus last week, they gave their doctors
permission to punch into a national server anonymous codes generated by
a new contact tracing application on their phones.

Moments later, the phones of people who had also voluntarily downloaded
the app and had come into contact with them buzzed with an alert.

Italy expanded that pilot program this week, to join the first European
countries using national contact tracing apps. France has also activated
its own app, Germany's was available for downloading as of Tuesday
morning, and Britain is testing one, too.

The launch of the apps comes as more European countries loosened
restrictions and opened borders to each other this week, hoping to
revive their societies and economies without reigniting the contagion.

But as they turn to unproven technology to avoid a second wave of
infection, European nations are setting off widespread debate about how
best to fight the virus while safeguarding privacy rights.

Italy's new app is just the latest iteration of the existential
challenges the virus has thrust upon Europe.

Just months ago, Italy crossed a threshold when it became the first
European country to mandate a strict nationwide lockdown, raising
questions of whether it was running roughshod over individual rights, as
well as threatening the European Union's internal cohesion, in its
effort to contain the virus.

Those concerns seemed to melt away quickly as more and more countries
saw the necessity for similar measures. Now the tracing apps present a
host of new questions, not least whether they work effectively or better
than human tracing — questions that have been posed in Australia where
the COVIDSafe app has been downloaded more than 6 million times.

Europeans also wonder whether the apps are placing nations on a slippery
slope towards a new kind of surveillance state, or handing over too much
power to foreign tech giants.

In addition, there are the questions of how to reconcile national
independence with Europe-wide interoperability. On Tuesday, the European
Union announced its members had agreed to standards to allow their
various apps to share data.

Such issues have not been limited to Europe and have been addressed
variably around the globe. In Asia, nations like South Korea have used
phone data and credit card activity to successfully track and contain
infections. India has required its citizens to download an app.

The United States has tended to rely on human tracers in efforts that
remain patchy and limited.

Italy has tried to finesse some of the thornier privacy concerns by
making its app — called Immuni, or Immune — voluntary. What's more, the
app is built on a platform developed in a rare collaboration between
Apple and Google, who sided with privacy advocates concerned about how
much data governments could collect, and limited Immuni's
data-transmission capabilities.

Those restrictions and the voluntary approach may reduce the app's
effectiveness but may also go some way towards assuaging public unease
about state intrusion. Its creators hope the app will be used widely
enough to play an important part in protecting public health.

"It could be a tool with major impact," said Paola Pisano, Italian
minister for technological innovation. "It depends on how it will be used."

Initially, Italy had envisioned a centralised system that would send
data about potentially contagious interactions to the government. But
European sensibilities about privacy, and the meteoric arrival of Apple
and Google into the debate, led it to reverse course.

Some public health officials said that Apple and Google's design
prioritises privacy at the expense of learning more about the disease,
an unusual criticism for an industry more often accused here of gobbling
up personal data for profit and power.

"This is a healthcare strategy in a global pandemic with thousands of
deaths," said Cédric O, the junior minister for digital affairs in
France, who is leading the development of the country's tracing app,
StopCovid. It does not use Apple and Google's standards. "It is highly
abnormal that you are constrained as a democratic state in your
technical choice because of the internal policies of two private companies."

The apps built with Apple and Google limit what data can be collected
about each reported infection, such as how long or how closely an
infected person was in proximity to someone else.

They also curtail a government's ability to perform deeper statistical
analysis about a person's connections or to study the characteristics of
a super spreader, said Christophe Fraser, an infectious disease expert
at Oxford University's Big Data Institute, which has advised Britain,
France, Germany and Italy on its tracing apps.

"Epidemiological insight is the information we need right now," he said.
"We need it to prevent infection, to be able to resume our lives with a
degree of normality and to save lives."

Other governments have determined the privacy intrusion is not worth the
potential benefits. In Norway, officials this week halted the use of its
app after the country's data-protection authority raised alarms.

Pisano argued that Italy struck the best balance possible for a country
that "is not South Korea, and we are also happy that it isn't." She
added that if Italy only had to consider health concerns, and not
citizens' privacy, "military GPS gives me precision to 3 millimetres."

But she also attributed Italy's about-face to what she said was its
failure to integrate a centralised model with the operating systems on
Apple phones, which tightly safeguarded privacy.

She said Italy's goal of "inclusivity," and thus effectiveness,
motivated the decision. She said it had the benefit of addressing
privacy concerns, and potentially making the app more integrated with
those of other European nations. Germany, she said, had taken some of
Italy's code and consulted with Italian technicians.

"France has accepted to be less inclusive," she said. The French had
different priorities, she said, including avoiding reliance on Silicon
Valley: "For France it was more important to remain unattached to
certain giants or to develop the app internally."

In the meantime, she said Italy continued to negotiate with Apple to get
as much data as possible for research, including about the quantity of
infections in a given area. "They have to loosen up a little," she said.

Navigating all these concerns has delayed the release of contact tracing
applications across Europe. In Italy, myriad layers of Italian
bureaucracy and regional opposition compounded delays, and as of this
week, 2.7 million Italians — in a country with a population of 60
million — had downloaded Immuni.

Pisano, reluctant to raise expectations, studiously avoided an official
target number for downloads, though she said the government "had a
calculation." She said that the real universe of potential users, when
one subtracted those without access to the internet or those under the
14 years of age required to download the app, was about 30 million Italians.

She said the government would begin a major advertising campaign this
week to get the word out, knowing full well that Immuni's success
depends on a critical mass of Italians downloading it.

Fraser, who worked on earlier epidemics including SARS, said that even
if slightly more than 10 per cent of a population used a tracing app, it
could cut down on infections. He estimated that for every one to two
users, one infection could be prevented.

"We think that incremental benefit is really quite striking," he said.

Luca Ferretti, an epidemiologist who also works at Oxford's Big Data
Institute and advised the Italian government, raised a more fundamental
concern: Italy and many other countries had not thought through how to
manage a person who receives a notification through the app.

He lamented that without widespread testing and a network of human
tracers, the technology would be less effective. Some regions have not
trained doctors how to use the app and respond to people who have
received an alert.

"Nobody factored in, once people have a notification, what should they
do?" he said.

Even if the app takes off, many experts consider it a poor substitute
for contact-tracing boots on the ground.

In Italy, mostly healthcare professionals, administrative staff and, if
needed, people from veterinary public services can be employed in
contact tracing.

But Pisano spoke dismissively about the more old-fashioned,
door-knocking approach, which proved critical in stopping past
epidemics. "We believe in technology," she said.

The New York Times

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Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email: brd at iimetro.com.au