In November a citizen fell and died in front of the Sixties pub in Mainz (Germany). The police were looking for witnesses and asked the Prosecutor’s Office for permission to access the Luca application, used in Germany to track contacts of people with covid through QR codes. One of those contacted by the police was Oliver Mattern, who declared in a local media: “How can it be if only the health authorities can contact me?” In principle, by law, access to Luca is limited to the health authorities, but the Prosecutor’s Office found a reason to force them to share them with the Police.
“The medical health office, which is in charge of contact tracing, simulated a contagion at the premises in order to access Luca’s data,” explains Lorena Jaume Palasí, founder of the non-profit organization Ethical Tech. Society and resident in Germany. “They handed them over to the police. At a legal level it is interesting because the interpretation of the Prosecutor’s Office would require a judicial ruling, which at the moment does not exist, ”he adds. Now that the shed has been uncovered, the data has been erased.
Such a use of private data is precisely what was feared could happen when the technological option of contact tracing emerged in March 2020: police or companies using geolocated data or data from networks of friends for investigations. The Luca app is not one of those. Use QR codes instead of bluetooth. The original tracking app in Germany is Corona-Warn-App.
In Spain with the arrival of the omicron wave in recent weeks there have been jokes on Twitter about Radar Covid. Contact tracing apps like that app, once presented by the government as an essential tool to combat the pandemic, have certainly played a minor and uneven role in the countries that have used them.
But the illegitimate exploitation of Luca’s data reveals the difficulty in achieving the ideal balance between a tracking solution that respects privacy, is useful for health authorities and is accepted by the population. However, it is not an impossible task if we take into account the speed and tension under which the entire process of adopting these applications took place.
Now, almost two years later, there is a little more time to adjust to the future. The technology behind bluetooth tracking applications, based in many cases on a protocol called DP3T created by a team led by the Spanish engineer Carmela Troncoso, continues to evolve to help in future waves or pandemics with a more appropriate design.
The covid radar app must be fuming.
– normal person (@sincarisma) January 10, 2022
1. Why the apps didn’t work
The two great shortcomings of the national applications were the adoption and the fit with the public health system: “The applications have not been successful for two reasons,” says Troncoso. “First, the adoption. It makes sense: if the people around you don’t have it, the app isn’t going to help you. And two, the difficulty in integrating it into the health system. It is not only because of bureaucracy, but because of the lack of a digital fabric”, he adds.
One of the obvious surprises for the creators of the code, like Troncoso, was understanding that for the mass adoption of such a technology, their job was not the most difficult. “When we as programmers designed all this we thought that the easy part was to get the code [que daba el sistema sanitario] infected users so that they could upload their key. Well, no, that was the difficult part, since it depends on the integration with the health system”, he adds.
2. The greatest paradox: altruism versus need
A widespread fear for not downloading Radar Covid was the supposed danger of giving away the data or being spied on. But no abuses have been found in the applications made from the DP3T protocol that Google and Apple adopted for their mobiles. However, with QR or other systems, yes.
The key here is to look at the benefit that each application brought. Radar Covid only informed you of a possible contagion. Certificate apps allow you to enter bars and concerts. There is no color in the benefit. “From a technology point of view, it has been a success,” says Troncoso. “Technology does what it should do and prevents what it should prevent. It is a perfect demonstration that goals can be achieved without risk. This is the first time something like this has been done on such a large scale and it works. In December I received many questions from journalists about the failure. I have not seen any failure. We created something that is difficult to extend, that it is difficult for more things to be created about it, that can be expanded and pervert its function. It has avoided any risk and has had a positive influence”, he adds.
Radar Covid comes to work and the mobile sounds more familiar to us than the light of the island of temptations 😂
– Álvaro Medina (@alvaro_medinas) December 20, 2021
Even so, the lack of knowledge about the behavior of the virus at the beginning was an added problem in adapting these applications: “Since aerosols are the main element of transmission”, says Bart Preneel, technical head of the Belgian application Coronalert, “we should having added a registration function for bars, restaurants and public transport from the beginning.” “A privacy-tight design called CrowdNotifier was made in early 2021, but there was little interest in adding it because everyone believed the pandemic was almost over. France and Germany added this functionality but in a less privacy-friendly way,” he adds.
3. But what is a tracking technology to do?
Here we enter the great technological background debate of this system. The Internet and mobile phones have accustomed us to the fact that tracking and data accumulation is always possible. This has a problem and an advantage: the problem is the decline of privacy and the advantage is to better understand social phenomena.
Such an application should have provided valuable information to epidemiologists. But that same socially useful information would have been a mine for police and companies that want to trade with that data. “Medical experts are not happy because they wanted an app that would collect more data. The problem is that more data means higher privacy risks. And as a consequence, fewer people will use the app. The Luca app shows that their fears are correct: if too much information is collected, this information will potentially be abused by others, such as law enforcement,” explains Preneel.
The DP3T solution was conceived to trace contacts but it was going to do it in a way where the data would not be collected and could not be exploited: “This technology has not gone further because this was its path: help with this and disappear”, Troncoso says.
But as a society we are not used to that. We are more used to what has happened with Luca: ”Luca and the certificate applications are systems without technical protection when it comes to being used for other things. In Germany, T-Systems and SAP partner with companies from ticketing to do automatic verification [de un certificado] when you buy the ticket to go to a concert. It turns out that the companies ticketing They pay for this service. It is a change in architecture: we went from a decentralized, public system, with privacy guarantees, to a system where verification is carried out by a central entity that charges for the service,” says Troncoso.
Hence, basically, the fundamental debate that should emerge is what kind of digital society we want: one where we can trust technology but it shows its limitations or another where we get dangerously close to the all-seeing eye? “I am optimistic, because I believe that with layers of various security measures it is possible to provide a service like contact tracing without compromising privacy,” says Ieva Ilves, adviser to the president of Latvia and a member of the team behind Apturi Covid, the app. latvian tracing. “It is as if you enter the clinic and you do not doubt that the doctor leaks your health data. These layers are not only technical, although we also see a lot of progress here (how to encrypt, decentralize, anonymize the data), but also how we guarantee data ownership, transparency, legal responsibility and ethics”, he adds.
4. The problem is not only technological
A common hope for technology is that it will be a “silver bullet” that fixes everything in one fell swoop. This is often the illusion of rulers who hope that a small investment will solve a pandemic for them. “Much of all this happens because we believe that digital is going to solve the social. It is one of the criticisms that the applications received. They take the focus away from other difficult solutions that require more investment. A lot of conversations we had with trackers were like, can we fix the problem of people lying? No, not this app or any other. Technology is not the way to solve those problems. You have to find out why people lie and solve it,” says Troncoso.
5. But then this works for pandemics?
Experts think so: “I fear that future pandemics will require contact tracing. And it seems hard to imagine that we will go back to the old days of manual contact tracing with calls or SMS,” says Preneel. “It is also likely that in the next five years, phones will change from BLE (bluetooth low energy) to UWB (ultra wide band); this can result in more accurate distance estimates,” he adds.
The DP-3T team has not abandoned its work. With the pressure of confinement, the goal was to release something that was accepted and did not end up becoming a new social tracking tool. That has been the great success. “This technology is an intervention that does only one thing. For people in the medical field this was a shock. When you do paper tracking, the data has a dual use: tracking and understanding the disease. We believe that if you want something to understand the disease, it must be different. Because the infrastructure that is created when you do it on paper and interview 100 people is very different from when you tell the entire population to put something on their mobile”, says Troncoso.
I mean, it can work. “We continue to work on how to bring it to places with less infrastructure or fewer telephones,” says Troncoso. “Can I make a combination with a dongle [un aparatito independiente del móvil que llevaríamos todos]? was unthinkable in March 2020 having only 15 days Y not be able to give a dongle everyone, but in the long term why not think about it”, says Troncoso
6. What if you could start over?
In addition to problems with the healthcare system or lack of adoption, Troncoso saw something else in her 2020 job that left her concerned. For DP-3T to work, Google and Apple had to adapt it for their mobiles. This time they agreed, but Troncoso was surprised by the power of these two companies. Perhaps it is the teaching that most worries him in this whole process.
“If I could make a change, it would be to have prevented the display of power by Google and Apple. The ability they had to decide what will happen, how and when. DP-3T also influenced, but it was a compendium of international people supported by 300 experts. This power is problematic and it opened my eyes to many things and if I went back I don’t know if I can say that we would do it differently because the time was what we had, but looking at the future we have to think about the power of the big technology companies, the power what it means to be the owner of the infrastructure”, explains Troncoso.
We are at the beginning of a digital world. This process has allowed us to see the seams of the future and that the conflicts will be greater than what we have seen: “Our objective was not only to produce the technology but also for the information to reach the public, with reflections in Parliaments and on the street. It is basically the debate on how to build a digital world. The architecture of digital systems has a large political component. It is, for example, knowing the impact that all of our infrastructure is going to be run by Google,” says Troncoso.
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