Since the outbreak of COVID-19, technology evangelists from all around the world are trying to support humanity along with medical practitioner, virologies, epidemiologist and administration etc. One way they are thinking to help peoples to report their symptoms and track the disease. What can be more effective to reach any individual’s life than personal gadget, nowadays? Smartphones are nowadays a pack of a good number of electronic chips, capable of doing a wide range of functions that communicate via radio waves. They talked to GPS satellites in space or transmitters on towers and buildings and also regular short-range communication standard like Wi-Fi too.
With those existing features, however, if you have got a phone, you are already being tracked continuously by your telco provider, and the likes of Google software too as you move around.
That’s important to understand because, as prototyped and promised (in western countries), COVID trace app won’t do that. Instead, it relies only on the low power short-range Bluetooth system build on the phone, continually sending and receiving signals from one phone to another. Now that significant because unlike cell networks, Bluetooth doesn’t generally map the location of a phone, so let me explain how it supposedly works in reference to the APP Australia is using.
-The COVID safe app in Australia is designed of collecting data from the users who are staying 1.5-meter proximity for 20 minutes to each other. Now assume, In mid-April say four people Alice, Bob, Liz and Glen, install the app. From that point, say all go about their daily business life like exercise and shopping for essentials. Assume that, they don’t know each other, but as they move around in the community, their app is working inherently in the background and receiving data from one another. Now the next week, say Liz develops a cough and test ‘positive’ to COVID-19. Her local health Department detectives get straight on to Liz for an interview. But instead of asking the usual question where have you gone during the last fortnight they first gain access to the app database of the very precise data record, her phones been silently scooping up for the last 21 days.
- It shows Liz and Alice had stood in a line at what turns out to be a supermarket for 20 minutes.
- One day Liz, Anne, Bob had sat next to each other in what they discovered was a doctor’s waiting room for half an hour, and Glen happens to be her neighbour in Bluetooth range via shared balconies at Lizs apartment block.
At this point, Investigators will make calls to all three of them and take measures and needs for that trace detectives.-
Now, interestingly, what the app doesn’t tell them is anything about the dozens of people Liz had been near who did not have the app installed or perhaps weren’t carrying a phone at all. That’s somewhere the effectivity reduces unless every single person does use the apps. That’s why the government is urging as many people as possible to embrace the system.
Now if we look at the information the apps COVIDsafe in Australia designed to collect (this varies from country to country, say the app of China is supposedly taking more personal information along with location, the tracing app from Korea even went further and provide authorities with the ability to alert users when they’ve been in direct contact with a confirmed positive cases) name, phone number, postcode, and age range. And after diagnosis with COVID this information will be mapped with your diagnosed result in the server.
Now the first question comes, whether the app really working around the information you are providing or can sniff more personal data? As people from some other countries are suspecting that this is the way the government starts tracing and monitoring them, their personal call and relationship?
Again, there are usual privacy and security concerns about cyber hacking of health Department and the sharing of phone details with government agencies not dealing directly with the virus. Overall, whether my privacy will be secured?
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