Alerts in the age of COVID-19

Nigerians love alerts on their handsets, especially those that come from their banks informing them that some “serious” money have landed in their bank accounts. It is always instant happiness to see a bigger bank balance following an alert. It could be an alert on the deposit of your salary, or a customer has just transferred money to your account to pay what he is owing you. You could just have received an alert on an international wire transfer of money from a faraway place, or some friends or relations might just have decided to “raise” you by putting money in your bank account. Trust me, these kinds of alert feel good. Sadly, though, these days, bank alerts are rare, due to COVID-19-inpsired lockdowns. It is everyone’s prayer that things return to normal very soon.

Meanwhile, there is another kind of phone alert in the works in the age of COVID-19, if Google and Apple have their way, and this one is coming from the other side of happiness.  On 10 April 2020, Google and Apple, two world-leading computer-based tech companies, announced a plan to develop a platform that could alert you if you have been exposed to COVID-19. This alert on your phone tells you if you have been exposed because someone to whom you have been in close contact has been diagnosed with the disease. The process of locating (tracking down) people who have been in contact with infected persons is referred to as contact tracing. For a pandemic such as COVID-19, the purpose is to track down and quarantine everyone that has been in contact with an infected person, to help control the spread of the disease. This saves lives.

Although Google and Apple are said to not set out to develop an app, it is envisioned that the eventual functionality would be incorporated somehow into Google’s Android and Apple’s devices at the operating system level. The proposed alert system could then be available to billions of handsets around the world. Google’s sample alert on your phone, if you have been exposed, could say something like: “You have recently been exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19.” Note that the initiative by Google and Apple is not the first. According to a recent New York Times newspaper article, 28 countries around the world have launched contact tracing apps, including 11 European countries, while another 11 are developing apps based on GPS or Bluetooth data, according to an analysis by the law firm Linklaters.

Technically speaking, the technology proposed by Google and Apple will allow mobile devices to exchange information via short-range wireless technology Bluetooth connections to alert people when they have been in close proximity with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. The low energy version of Bluetooth, or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), is said to be contemplated for use. The particular system proposed is based on a version of the BLE Beacon system, which has been in use for many years, but is now being modified to work as a two-way code swap between phones.

Security wise, as you can imagine, the proposed platform seems synonymous with privacy invasion; in terms of determining your location, aggregating data of people around you, as well as the potential to broadcast people’s health conditions. No wonder US law makers say that Google and Apple will have “to convince the public that any contact tracing technology to track who has been exposed to the new coronavirus will not lead to a violation of their privacy.”

Apple and Google say their proposed contact tracing technology itself will not rely on location information (GPS), although the two companies generally allow app developers to collect location information! The European Commission said in a statement that app use should be voluntary and not involve any type of data that pinpoints people’s location. “Location data is not necessary nor recommended for the purpose of contact tracing apps, as their goal is not to follow the movements of individuals or to enforce prescriptions,” the Commission says, while citing security and privacy risks. The US privacy rights group American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked that rather than tracking where a person has gone, apps should use Bluetooth signals exchanged between phones to track encounters.

Will folks sign up for COVID-19 alert? I doubt it, especially in the more conservative civilizations of the world, such as in Africa. Even in the US, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious diseases expert, told the news arm of Snap, Inc. in an interview last week that users likely would reject contact tracing apps that collect location data. An early April Pew Research Center survey shows that Americans are acutely divided over government tracking of locations of people who test positive for COVID-19. According to the survey, approximately 52% of the respondents say it would be acceptable, while 48% sayit would be unacceptable. Researchers at Oxford University’s Big Data Institute in the UK suggest that approximately two-thirds of a country’s population would need to be involved for contact tracing to be effective.