7/12/2020

Headline, July 13 2020/ PRIVACY : ''' '' APPS ! GOING ROGUE '' '''


PRIVACY : ''' '' APPS ! 

GOING ROGUE '' '''




PRIVACY IS A CRITICAL CONCERN ON The World Students Society but then so is, protecting public health. Trade-offs Watch begins.

AFTER 3,000 people from the Diamond Princess cruise ship disembarked in Taiwan in late January  - some of whom were later found to be infected -

The Taiwanese government tapped into the geolocation data of individual cellphone users to look for contact between its citizens and the passengers.

The technology found 627, 386 residents of Taiwan who had been in the vicinity of the passengers. The Taiwanese citizens' location data was also taken using other surveillance methods; the buses they took, the locations where they used credit cards, security-camera footage and their phone data.

Those residents all received text messages and were offered tests if they exhibited symptoms. Of 67 people tested, none were positive. Dr. Eysenbach, who is an author of a paper on the test, said it had been effective but ''did not require informed consent'' and ''would in the Western world be perceived as very privacy invasive.''

A report called ''Apps Gone Rogue,'' published in April by the MIT Media Lab, found that many international versions of contact-tracing technology ''expand mass surveillance, limit individual freedoms and expose the most private details about individuals.''   

The handshake came first. Then, the high-five, the first bump and more recently, the elbow touch. Canadian researchers are now working on a new greeting, the CanShake.

It is not a mere salutation. The CanShake - which involves people shaking their phones at each other upon meeting to transmit contact information - is one of the many emerging contact tracing to track and contain the spread of the coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid-19.

All involve harnessing common consumer technology to log a person's location or movement and match those against the location of the people known to be sick.

There are dozens of versions, many already in practice around the world, in places like South Korea, Singapore, China, Italy and Israel. But in the United States, privacy concerns and the absence of national policy have made the approach slower to catch on.

Efforts are piecemeal. Google and Apple have a partnership to develop software for smartphones that would enable them to continuously log information from other devices.

The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built contact tracing technology too. Three states - Alabama, North Dakota, and South Dakota - have said they have deployed or are developing apps for tracking the virus.

The experimentation is happening as states, counties and cities work to train people for the traditional, more arduous approach to contact tracing.

''There's an army of contact tracers being hired. Technology can make this much more efficient,'' said Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, editor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, who is developing the CanShake.

George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco who is leading training of 10,000 California contact tracers, said digital ideas are bubbling up. ''We've gotten several hundred people who want to show us their stuff,'' he said.

But he said they rely on smartphones, and some people who may be most at risk from Covis-19 can't afford them.

The traditional method of contact  tracing is time-consuming and labor intensive. It takes about 90 minutes for each case, Dr. Rutherford said - 60 minutes to interview the person who tests positive and 30 minutes to call or send texts to all the people the sick person remembers being in contact with.

Whatever the technology, there are trade-offs among the three major ways that the information can be shared, stored and communicated : geolocation, Bluetooth and QR codes.

GEOLOCATION
This software that typically runs in the background on phones to help with location services like  Google Maps. It can track people to within about 10 meters of their location and be turned on and off voluntarily.

In countries outside the United States, however, this technology has worked partly because it has been used automatically, with governments taking the data without asking permissions.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Privacy and the World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Matt Richtel.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Grandparents, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011:

''' Tracking - Trapping '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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