The Promise and Hazards of COVID Contact Tracing Apps


There has been increasing interest in the possibilities of tracking people who are infected with Coronavirus using all of the various methods that smart phones provide. There is good reason: “contact tracing” has been a pillar of public health efforts for decades. It is an effective means to curtail the spread of infectious disease. At the same time, governments, companies, and organizations are acting fast to offer services to help end this current pandemic. The problem is that many of these are taking advantage of these times to introduce more tracking of people, more data collection, and more control over people. We must not let contact tracing be used to reduce privacy and increase unnecessary data collection.

Privacy International has been collecting examples of new data and tracking that are being introduced.

Then there this is the specific issue of contact tracing apps that are being introduced around the world. These apps can be made in a way to fully respect privacy, and to build trust with its users. Unfortunately the majority of the ones introduced are failing to live up to this promise. Singapore’s TraceTogether was the first to rise to prominence, it is proprietary software with obfuscated operations. (update: the source for a reference implementation has since been released, but TraceTogether is still proprietary) A some audits pointed to failings, including potentially sending location data to a third-party analytics service. There are now many of these apps, and based on this analysis, most of them are sending data to third party tracking companies.

On top of that, these audits took much more effort because the apps were not open source. There have been many pledges of making these apps open source, but the only one that we have found that is actually open source is Private Kit. Free, open source software is essential for software that needs to be widely trusted. This is only key design element, the CCC has laid out a complete list of requirements for creating trustworthy contact tracing apps.

We stand ready to help any of these efforts achieve real privacy and build public confidence. People must trust these apps for them to be effective. Transparency is essential to building trust. They must be secure so they do not leak personal data. And they must be usable by the vast majority of the population.