The U.S. Digital-Contact-Tracing Debacle
About a month into the pandemic, I got a phone call from somebody who told me they’d just heard about an elegant technical solution that might stop COVID in its tracks. They had been talking with a team in Switzerland that was trying to develop a Bluetooth-based contact-tracing app. The pitch was simple: Contact tracing in those early months was woefully understaffed and under-prioritized and couldn’t keep pace with COVID’s (first, we now know) march around the globe. With unclear incubation times and asymptomatic cases, this meant that plenty of people were walking around unwittingly contagious. But what if peoples’ phones could tell them if they’d come in contact with a COVID-positive individual? It might change everything.
I was skeptical. I’d spent the last few months of 2019 working on a seven-part series about the massive privacy implications of smartphone location tracking. The project radicalized me a bit and I could only think of the ways that a digital virus-surveillance tool might be used nefariously by governments and corporations against citizens. But I was also pretty terrified of this new virus and imagined that pandemic mitigation would perhaps take forms that made me slightly uncomfortable. I followed the project from a distance but never wrote about it.
Then, in April 2020, Apple and Google announced an unprecedented partnership to build out a Bluetooth-based platform. Basically, Apple’s and Google’s phone operating systems act as conduits—they passively log a record of the devices that you’ve been in proximity with (not the actual device IDs but a private key). This information is stored on a server run by a government third party. If somebody becomes infected, they report this information. It registers in the database, and all the keys that have been in proximity with an infected user get an
