The Failure of Digital Contact Tracing during COVID-19

-- By YanisAliouche - 13 Oct 2023

Introduction

The COVID-19 epidemic represented a massive shift in governments and populations reliance towards technology in order to ensure the continuation of work, education, and general communications amidst the health crisis. Because of this extensive reliance arose the question as to whether the development of new digital platforms could help combat the ever-developing epidemic. Governments decided to put this to the test through the implementation of COVID contact-tracing apps. This essay aims to address how the faith of governments in digital contract tracing and covid tracing apps was misplaced and failed when combatting the spread of the virus.

Off to a bad start: the lack of expertise of governments in app development

To start out, the lack of expertise of state governments in app development did not help these apps get off to a good start. Constant delays and errors in the development of the apps already put in question the efficiency of these apps. Teddy Gold, director of a nonprofit making pandemic response software witnessed the difficulty of coordination in governments, as app developers were sent from various administrative departments and offices to department in order to obtain adequate permissions – “States don’t develop apps”. This caused delays in the release of these apps overall, and created the sentiment that they were arriving too late: “It’s like the plane has crash-landed and everyone has died and the captain scrambles out of the rubble and he’s like, ‘Okay guys, in an emergency landing there are lifejackets under your seats”.

Governments didn’t have the time and resources to get it right, and in consequence, many rushed development. In Norway for instance, the app Smittestopp was shut down shortly after its release as the ‘the risks of intensified surveillance outweighed the app’s as of yet unproven public health benefits” . In India, after the app that was downloaded more than 77 million times, it was found that it was able to leak users’ precise locations. The government then fixed the issue and began paying security researchers who found vulnerabilities in their app. This policy adopted by some of releasing these apps then refining and correcting their issues after affected the peoples’ trust in the government, a component vital in the struggle against the pandemic. It seems that these efforts were more about showcasing government engagement in fighting the virus rather than implementing effective means.

Ineffectiveness of the Apps

Ultimately, digital contact tracing failed to be efficient. Firstly, not enough people used the apps for them to be functional. An Oxford study stated that for these to be effective, 60% of the country’s population would have to download and use the apps. Many states failed to achieve these numbers: in Germany 21.7% of the population had the app. In Ireland, 26.3%. In New York and New Jersey, 4% had the app downloaded a month after release. Even those that did download the apps may not have isolated following receipts of exposure notifications.

For the people to engage in this digital contact tracing, governments needed to gain people’s trust: trust in the government and trust in their response to the epidemic.

Privacy and efficiency

The more data was collected by the apps, the more people may worry about the divulgation of their personal information – from location to sensitive information. For instance, digital contact tracing pseudonymizes data – it doesn’t anonymize it. In the case of centralized systems such as France or Australia where one this may pose issues when combining other data collected by the platform, which may lead to identifying individuals.

However, privacy doesn’t paint the whole picture: it is true that people were ready to sacrifice their privacy if they were sure the app would ensure a road towards ‘normalcy’ – if they were efficient. If we look at Singapore for instance, many people opted into downloading the tracing app after the government promised to relax restrictions when adoption increased from 50% to 70%. Additionally, too much privacy could make difficult for public health officials and individuals to have information that may be important to better understand the spread of the virus.

Poor advertisement

The apps were often advertised in the wrong way – either not advertised enough, or advertised through the wrong lens: the technology was not meant to replace traditional means of tracing and public health methods generally, it was meant to accompany these. Governments however used the wrong approach – the Australian app COVIDSafe was advertised as a “digital vaccine” and a “road to recovery”. In Norway, the Prime Minister assured “if many people download the Smittestopp app, we can open up society more and get our freedom back”. At the time, we knew it was wrong. Today, we know this is untrue.

App mechanisms

The apps themselves proved to be quite ineffective. Many were easily hackable and could divulge lots of personal information in unwanted hands, as we explored with the issues present at app rollouts. In addition, the apps functioned through BlueTooth? or GPS, which posed significant challenges. Bluetooth signals moves through walls, meaning you may receive a notification for COVID exposure even though you were separated from the infected. The systems don’t know many circumstances, such as whether the individual wearing a mask… A study on contact tracing through Bluetooth revealed that Bluetooth’s distance measurements were highly inaccurate on a tram: the app sent false positives and false negatives for contact at a 50% rate – “the performance of such detection rules is similar to that of triggering notifications by randomly selecting from the participants in our experiments, regardless of proximity”.

What worked?

The focus on the development of these apps should have been redirected on more efficient means of combatting the epidemic, notably sticking to what we know best: traditional public health methods: manual contact tracing helped identify the spread of the virus more concisely by directly identifying individuals and their recent contacts and settings. Investment in infrastructures where personnel and equipment were lacking – there was a need for more hospital beds, COVID tests, masks…