Europe Prepares Mobile Apps to Track People Infected with Coronavirus

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The phone beeps. An alert pops up: “You’ve been in contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus. Ask for testing and isolate yourself until you learn the result”. A similar message may soon be circulating through Spanish smartphones.

European countries have become increasingly aware that an app that allows the tracking of cases will be a major tool to control the epidemic when the population is allowed to go out again.

Spain’s Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence announced on Monday its participation in a European project developed in Germany called PEPP (Pan-European Proximity Tracking to Preserve Privacy). “We bet on a single application for the whole of Europe. Only by achieving interoperability between countries will it be possible to guarantee traceability that ensures the exchange of anonymous data in the fight against Covid-19,” said the head of the Secretariat, Carme Artigas.

In broad terms, it works as follows: when an individual knows that he or she has been infected, he or she notifies the fact in an app that, using Bluetooth, has been storing all mobile phone users with whom the person has had close contact, which includes keeping a distance of less than two meters for at least five or ten minutes (the exact parameters have not yet been set).

All these individuals would then receive the alert recommending the test. From this point on, many details remain to be accomplished, which will depend both on the technological solution adopted and on the extent to which Governments decide to make use of the app and notifications through it compulsory.

Apple and Google have already worked together on an unprecedented cooperation to enable this global protocol. The plan is for each country to choose an app and make it available to the technological giants – which in Spain control 99 percent of the market – so that an update of the operating system can install it, initially only with the user’s permission, but without the user’s need for intervention – there would be no need to look for the app for download.

In Spain, sources from the State Secretariat for Artificial Intelligence say they will be prepared for when the Ministry of Health calls for this solution. “We will have the technology ready for whatever is necessary. We are actively observing and prepared to offer all the technological options that the health authorities decide or not to adopt”. For now, no specific plan has been started, they concede.

The day Spain invests in an app, it will have to rely on private initiative. “The government has no developers,” these sources caution. The focus is on Asian countries, particularly Singapore, which has developed the model most similar to what is being studied in Europe.

Helena Legido-Quigley, a researcher from the National University of Singapore, explains that these solutions can be very useful: “It is about automating what this country had already done very successfully at the start of the epidemic by hand: tracing the contacts. But it will largely depend on the adherence and cooperation of citizens.

In Asia, they have a more collectivist spirit which may make it easier, in comparison with Europe, for people to provide this kind of data to control an epidemic”. It is still early, says Legido-Quigley, to assess the result, although the small Asian country has resorted to confinement since April 7th, after a third wave of coronavirus infections.

This kind of tracking is therefore not a magic solution, nor is it clear that it works. But in recent weeks it has increasingly been viewed as the only major technological alternative. If the two companies controlling the majority of mobile phones in the world introduce it, we know that they will now be used to fight the pandemic, but there is no guarantee that they will be used for less constructive purposes later on.

Apple and Google insist that they will disable it once the pandemic has ended. The concept sparks all kinds of ethical and legal debate.

Itziar de Lecuona, of the Bioethics department at the University of Barcelona, believes that apps can be a “tremendously invasive solution regarding fundamental rights, intimacy, and privacy. “It will deal with very sensitive information and there is no 100 percent secure system. The debate is what kind of app there will be, but I wonder if this is really the solution,” she argues.

If it’s going to be used, she advocates that it should be minimally invasive, that it has previously defined what will be controlled, who, for how long and why. “Wouldn’t it be more logical first to generalize the tests and move on from there?”, she asks.

Eduardo Manchón, digital consultant and founder of the companies Mailtrack and Panoramio (bought by Google), acknowledges that in technology it is impossible not to leave traces, but assures that there are solutions that would provide great security and that users’ privacy does not need to be compromised.

“When you set mobile phones to connect via Bluetooth, they can do so through codes in which not even the user is identified. And the data can be stored on each device, you don’t even have to be on a server”, he explains.

If the structure adopted by the governments could access the data, the measures taken with it would depend on each one: “They could range from sending a drone to tell the patient that he needs to be confined, in the most extreme case, to leaving it to each one’s discretion, assuming their own responsibility, which I believe will be what will be done in Europe, where there is great concern about privacy,” adds Manchón.

In any event, he doesn’t believe there are ethical reasons not to use mobile phone apps which, he assures, could be an ally against coronavirus and no more invasive to intimacy than many other actions available to governments.

Andrés Torrubia, an entrepreneur and specialist in artificial intelligence, observes that what remains to be seen is the extent to which they work.

“We need to calibrate them very carefully so that they are not constantly sending out alerts, otherwise they would be of no use. You also have to take into account that there are people who might want to trick the system into causing mistakes. All this seems to me to be more relevant than security, which is what we talk about most. There is nothing infallible, but there may be reasonably safe solutions. But before launching them you have to build prototypes to see if they are actually useful,” he says.

Spain is behind other countries, which have already announced their intention to embrace these solutions. In Germany, politicians and scientists have been discussing such an app for weeks as a key tool in the post-isolation stage. The plan is that it will come into operation in the coming weeks, but in any case it will be for voluntary use by citizens, in compliance with data protection laws.

In France, the app currently under development is called StopCovid. As President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, its installation on cell phones will be “voluntary” and will guarantee “anonymity”.

The Italian government also announced that an app of this kind will be used as a basis to start the end of confinement. So far, the Executive has received 300 proposals from technology companies to develop it.

The UK government is already testing an app that will allow users to alert the National Health Service (NHS) if they believe they have Covid-19 symptoms, as Health Minister Matt Hancock announced on Sunday. “All information will be handled under the strictest ethical and safety standards, will only be available to the NHS and will not be stored for longer than necessary,” Hancock pledged.

Before any app, and for these to be of any help, the underlying issue is testing. There will need to be enough for anyone with mild symptoms, or even without them (and after having direct contact with a carrier), to determine if they are sick.

Source: El País