The world’s 3 billion-plus smartphones emit the kind of datathat health authorities covet during outbreaks. They show whereindividuals are, where they’ve been and who they might have talkedto or even touched — potentially offering maps to find infectedpeople and clues to stopping new ones.
But gaining access to this data, even amid a global pandemic, ismade complex by the legal and ethical issues surrounding governmentaccess to information that can reveal intimate details aboutcitizens’ lives. That includes clues to their social networks,their sexual relationships, their political activity, theirreligious convictions and their physical movements over previousmonths and even years.
This is a central dilemma as officials in the United States andother nations seek troves of data that might help fight thedevastating coronavirus outbreak but also could raise fears thattheir government is spying on them or gaining access to informationthat could be used against them later, after the health emergencyhas waned.
Public-health experts argue that the location-tracking capabilitiesas practiced in such countries as Taiwan, South Korea and Singaporeproved remarkably effective at helping officials control the spreadof coronavirus — and that the U.S. needs all the help it can getamid projections that millions of Americans may get infected andhundreds of thousands may die.
“We are at war and we are fighting for our survival, for our lives,our health, our economy,” said Chunhuei Chi, director of the Centerfor Global Health at Oregon State University. “We are stretchedvery thin in most states, so this kind of technology can help everystate to prioritize, given their limited resources, whichcommunities, which areas, need more aggressive tracking andtesting.”
Many privacy advocates see value in potentially giving publichealth authorities access to information created by smartphone use.That’s especially true if the data is voluntarily shared, as isalready happening in several nations, where apps give users theoption of uploading their location histories to healthauthorities.
“There’s no reason to have to throw out our principles like privacyand consent to do this,” said Peter Eckersley, an artificialintelligence researcher who organized an open letter on ways thetech industry could help combat the outbreak.
There is far more concern, however, about the program underway inIsrael, which is using location data the government collected forfighting terrorism, to identify people potentially exposed to thenovel coronavirus and ordering them to immediately isolatethemselves “to protect your relatives and the public.” Hundreds ofsuch texts started being sent by health authorities there onWednesday. Late Thursday, the Israeli supreme court issued atemporary injunction, allowing only those who test positive to betracked, and ruled that a parliamentary committee would have toendorse the initiative by Tuesday or it must be shut down.
In the United States, the White House has been in negotiations withmajor technology companies, including Google and Facebook, aboutpotentially using aggregated and anonymized location data createdby smartphone use, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, butthose efforts have been kept largely from the public Based on ThePost’s reporting, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letterThursday seeking answers about potential partnerships between thefederal government and private companies.
“Although I agree that we must use technological innovations andcollaboration with the private sector to combat the coronavirus, wecannot embrace action that represents a wholesale privacy invasion,particularly when it involves highly sensitive and personallocation information,” Markey wrote to Michael Kratsios, thegovernment’s chief technology officer. “I urge you to balanceprivacy with any data-driven solutions to the current public healthcrisis.”
Telecommunications giants in Austria, Germany and Italy also saidthis week that they would provide anonymized data on customers’locations to government agencies hoping to analyze people’smovements.
O2, a telecom giant in the U.K., said Thursday that it was one of agroup of mobile operators in the country asked by governmentofficials to share aggregate location data on mass movements. Thediscussions are in an early stage, said a spokesman, who added thatthe company has “the potential to build models that help to predictbroadly how the virus might move.”
Privacy experts repeatedly have shown that supposedly anonymousdata can still be used to identify individual people, based ontheir known movements and other markers. Data that’s both anonymousand aggregated is far more private but also less useful inidentifying people at particular risk for contracting coronavirusand spreading it to others.
The U.S. government has broad authority to request personal data inthe case of a national emergency but does not have the legalauthority, except in criminal investigations, to insist thatcompanies turn it over, said Al Gidari, director of privacy atStanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
With appropriate safeguards, Gidari said the potential use oflocation data to combat coronavirus is “a real opportunity to dosomething positive with the technology and still protect people’sprivacy.”
But currently there are no legal controls on how the federalgovernment might use data once it has been collected, so locationinformation collected for a health emergency could later beacquired by the FBI or the IRS.
Such complexities put companies in the uncomfortable position ofbalancing public safety and their customers’ privacy in decidingwhat data to share.
Many public-health experts say however that there are examplesoverseas of how such technology blunted the fast-spreadingoutbreak. In South Korea, the government directed tens of thousandsof quarantined people to install a “Self-Quarantine SafetyProtection” app that would monitor their phone’s location and alerthealth authorities if they left home. People also could use the appto report daily symptom check-ins and speak with the localgovernment official overseeing their case.
On the app's website, the country's Ministry of the Interior andSafety said users would be protecting the “health and safety ofyour neighbors through strict self-isolation and observing therules of life.” But because the app is voluntary, some critics havesuggested its value is limited; people who wanted to skipquarantine could simply not turn it on.
Korean officials also routinely send text messages to people’sphones with public-health tips and alerts on newly confirmedinfections in their neighborhood — in some cases, alongside detailsof where the unnamed person had traveled before enteringquarantine.
But more so than the technology, the country’s vigoroushealth-screening infrastructure — more than 300‚000 people havebeen tested there in the last two months, compared to roughly80,000 in the U.S. — has been credited by researchers with helpingthe country slow the virus’ spread.
Singapore, too, has asked people to use a voluntarylocation-tracking system based around QR codes — the square barcodes with information readable by smartphones — installed in cabs,offices and public spaces, which people have been instructed toscan upon passing. Health officials there have said the digitalbreadcrumb trail can help with infection “contact tracing,” but thedata is far from complete, likely limiting its widespreaduse.
For an even more aggressive and seemingly effective example, somepublic-health experts have pointed to Taiwan, an island nation of24 million people that has recorded only 100 infections, though itsits just 80 miles off the Chinese coast.
The country uses mandatory phone-location tracking to enforcequarantines, sending texts to people who stray beyond theirlockdown range, directing them to call the police immediately orface a $33,000 fine. People who don’t have a GPS-enabled phone areissued a governmentprovided phone for the full length of thequarantine.
Devastated by a SARS outbreak in 2003, the country has spent yearsinvesting and preparing for viral outbreaks and, in some cases,disinformation campaigns from neighboring China. It also hasestablished a government agency, the Central Epidemic CommandCenter, with special crisis-era powers to gather data and trackpeople's movements.
When the outbreak spread, the government combined citizens’ healthrecords — from its universal heath-care system — with customs andimmigration records, helping piece together the travel histories ofpeople suspected of infection. Those histories were made instantlyavailable to medical providers, who tested for covid-19 and orderedquarantines for both confirmed cases and those who had traveledrecently from widely infected countries.
For everyone else, the government offers an app that provides dailyupdates on reported cases, travel restrictions and details oncommunity spread. Officials also make reams of real-time datapublicly available, including online maps of where people can buysurgical masks.
The level of data gathering and surveillance is deeply intimate.But Chi, the Center for Global Health director, said it has alsogiven Taiwanese people peace of mind about the unprecedented spreadof a virus they can’t see.
“When the public doesn’t get adequate information, you give roomfor fake information to spread, and also panic,” Chi said. “Whenyou do something like Taiwan did, you feel safe: You don’t have toworry about who’s infected. That’s not the case in the U.S.”
In the United States, wireless carriers such as AT&T andVerizon have extensive records on their customer’s movements basedon what cellular towers their smartphones use to connect to broadernetworks. AT&T said it has not had talks with any governmentagencies about sharing this data for purposes of combatingcoronavirus. Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.
The information collected by some technology companies issignificantly more precise, by tracking locations through GPS andthe proximity of individual users to wireless data sources. Google,which operates navigation apps Google Maps and Waze and alsoproduces the Android mobile operating system, the world’s mostpopular, has a particularly extensive trove of data.
Google said on Tuesday that it had not yet shared any data with theU.S. government to help combat the outbreak but it was consideringdoing so.
“We’re exploring ways that aggregated anonymized locationinformation could help in the fight against covid-19. One examplecould be helping health authorities determine the impact of socialdistancing, similar to the way we show popular restaurant times andtraffic patterns in Google Maps,” spokesman Johnny Luu said in astatement, stressing any such partnership “would not involvesharing data about any individual’s location, movement, orcontacts.”
Government officials also could simply buy location data fromcompanies that already collect and market such information,typically from apps that gather the locations of their users. Suchdata is readily accessible but regarded by technology experts asless comprehensive and reliable than data from other sources.
There are technical limits as well. Even the most granularcellphone data can be imprecise, potentially complicating its useas a logbook for establishing close interpersonal contact. MostGPS-enabled smartphones are accurate only within a roughly 15-footradius and can be obstructed by trees and roofs.
Many privacy advocates recall a previous national tragedy, theSept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, not only for the human toll indeaths and dislocation but the U.S. government’s subsequent movesto aggressively gain access to sensitive data through technicalmeans and expanded legal authorities.
The full sweep of that data grab only became clear years later,perhaps most powerfully when former National Security Agencycontractor Edward Snowden shared a huge trove of classifiedinformation with The Washington Post and other news organizationsin 2013.
That history looms over the current debate.
“It would be very unfortunate if the government’s failure toconduct testing when it had the opportunity now became the reasonfor expanded surveillance authority,” said Marc Rotenberg,president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a researchand advocacy group based in Washington.
The source of location data and how it was acquired could affecthow useful it is to government health experts. Ryan Calo, anassociate law professor at the University of Washington, saidlocation-sharing partnerships between government and industry, likephone location data or GPS-sharing apps, could serve as criticaltools for officials wanting to know, for instance, where crowds areviolating social-distance rules or which hospitals are dangerouslystrained.
But other ideas now being pursued in the U.S., including consumerapps where people are mapped based on their self-submitted healthstatus, threaten to promote a false sense of security that couldleave more people at risk.
“The immediate and obvious trouble is where you purport to convertthat information that’s crowdsourced, that’s imperfect, that can begamed, into some kind of broader knowledge that people can deployto avoid getting infected,” Calo said

Answer the following questions from the article above.

Question 1- South Korea implemented a “Self-Quarantine SafetyProtection” app. Suggest five potential requirements the app couldhave been designed to meet.

Question 2-  Assume you’ve been asked to build aCOVID-19 location tracking system. What are the limitations of thewaterfall approach to software development in this scenario?

Question 3- Identify the pros and cons of using crowdsourceddata in a COVID-19 response app or website.

Course- Management information system