COVIDSafe, a contact tracing application developed with the aim of reducing the spread of the coronavirus epidemic, has been available in Australia for a few hours. The app has already been downloaded more than a million times, marking a strong participation in the project by Australians, although there are doubts about the effectiveness of the tool and the protection of user privacy. COVIDSafe works similar to that described for Immuni, the application chosen in Italy for contact tracing, but on which the government does not seem to have very clear ideas yet.
Tracking contacts during an outbreak is important in identifying people who may have been infected. Contact tracing is mostly carried out by interviewing people who have tested positive for the coronavirus, with the aim of reconstructing which individuals they have come into contact with and who may have infected. It's time consuming work and properly trained staff, two resources that can be in short supply during a pandemic emergency.
Technology can help mitigate the problem, with solutions to make contact tracing more widespread and shared. Experiences in this sense have been carried out in South Korea and Singapore, with an application on which the development of COVIDSafe in Australia was based and which is called TraceTogether. Their use has led to results that are still difficult to interpret: on the one hand it has certainly made it easier to find some potentially exposed people, but at the same time it has highlighted the technical obstacles to creating practical applications enough for users, without count doubts about the protection of their privacy.
How COVIDSafe works
COVIDSafe is available on the two main application stores, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store (in their versions for 'Australia). After downloading it, the app offers some basic explanations, clarifying that it was created by the Australian government to reduce the spread of the coronavirus: “COVIDSafe will safely register other people who use the app you have come in contact with”.
Things to know about the coronavirus The Coronavirus Post newsletter updates you on the latest news: it's free and arrives every Thursday at 6pm. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter The app then explains that it is based on Bluetooth technology, the same one used to connect wireless headphones or to connect the smartphone to the car. COVIDSafe periodically issues a unique identifier (ID) that can be picked up by the smartphones that use the application, and that are nearby. If one of the app users later discovers that they are coronavirus positive, they can give their consent to health authorities to use this information in a centralized online registry.
COVIDSafe periodically connects to the registry and compares the list of IDs reported with those it has collected, passing by other smartphones that use the application. In case you find a match, send a notification to alert the user who can then contact the healthcare staff.
The ID for each user of the application is provided at the time of registration, again through the app. In order to register, you must enter your name and surname, your age and the postcode of the area in which you reside. The app then asks for a mobile number to have a unique reference to the user, and to prevent individuals from creating multiple IDs, complicating system management. You will then receive an SMS with a PIN to be entered in the app to confirm your identity.
Once set up, the application does everything by itself and requires no user intervention. The interface is simple and in any case includes some information sections on the progress of the epidemic, advice on how to reduce the risk of infections and a tool to report the existence of COVIDSafe to your contacts, inviting them to download and use it.
Who accesses the data
The Australian government has confirmed that it will be responsible for managing the online registry, where IDs of positive results are merged. However, the health authorities of the individual states (Australia has a federal structure) will have access to the information, while this will not be made available to law enforcement or other federal agencies. The police will not have access even with a warrant and the courts will not be able to force the government to provide information on individual users.
Localization
The application only collects anonymous IDs issued by nearby smartphones, with the time in which it collected the data. The ID and the time are two sufficient data to reconstruct a possible contact with a person who later tested positive. COVIDSafe therefore does not collect geographical information and does not use GPS, offering according to its developers some more guarantees for privacy.
Technical problems
Like other apps made so far for contact tracing, COVIDSafe is far from perfect. The basic technical problem depends on the fact that for security reasons the operating systems place some limitations on the use of Bluetooth, which up to now has existed for different purposes. For example, the operating system of the iPhone, iOS, maintains a system to prevent Bluetooth from working continuously, a condition that could reduce the safety of the smartphone and the life of its battery.
The limitations imposed by Apple had become evident in recent weeks in Singapore, where the TraceTogether application could work on iPhones only if always active and in the foreground (some apps perform some activities in the background, “background”, but with very limited functions also for Bluetooth). An update of TraceTogether has made it possible to mitigate the problem: now the tracking continues to work even if you are not using the app, as long as this was the last application to have been opened on the iPhone before having locked the screen , for example to put it in your pocket.
COVIDSafe also suffers from these limitations on iOS, but that should change in the coming weeks as Apple and Google finish developing a shared standard for using Bluetooth for contact tracking. Both companies will update their operating systems allowing them to develop applications with common functionality, and overcoming the problem of current limitations.
Optional
The use of COVIDSafe in Australia is optional, although widely recommended by the federal government and individual states. However, the government has reserved the right to verify how widespread the app will become and the first results it will offer, without therefore excluding that it may become mandatory at a later time.
Privacy
In general, solutions based on Bluetooth and not on GPS are considered less invasive from the point of view of privacy, because even if an attacker enters possession of the IDs collected by a smartphone would still not have enough data to reconstruct the movements of its owner. The use of data in aggregate form could still offer some information on individuals, but could only occur following a substantial theft of data from the centralized online register.
The Australian government has also pledged to keep the entire solution temporary. When the emergency is over, COVIDSafe will send a notification asking to be uninstalled and the data it has collected will be deleted.
And in Italy?
COVIDSafe has several things in common with Immuni, the application that the Italian government has chosen to develop to introduce social tracking via app also in our country. The ID mechanism should be similar, although in the case of Immuni it will involve the use of multiple IDs that change frequently for each smartphone, in order to better protect privacy.
Until a couple of weeks ago, the Immuni idea had been widely welcomed and promoted by the government, but in the last few days things seem to have gotten complicated. The app should have been at the center of the so-called “phase 2”, to better track the infection, but in the speech on Sunday evening by the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, no clear information was provided on Immuni or its development. There is talk of a confrontation in the government and in the various “task forces” on the coronavirus that is slowing down development, with a clash above all on whether or not to make the use of the application mandatory.
Do they work?
To date, there is not yet enough data to support with certainty that social tracking apps help reduce the spread of the infection. In South Korea they have been used extensively, but the country has nonetheless included their use in a much broader and more articulated plan which mainly involved the use of an enormous amount of tests, to detect positives as soon as possible and isolate them. from the rest of the population.
Social tracking apps can work, but only if used by a large portion of the population and only if they are included in a broader and more organic plan for managing the epidemic, experts and application developers themselves have long reported.
