Coronavirus: should patients be geolocated via their smartphones?
Israel and China rely on state surveillance tools to fight against the spread of the virus. Other countries are exploring mobile geolocation voluntarily.
Faced with the spread of Covid-19, the Israeli government has taken the radical step of geolocating coronavirus patients as well as those who could be. A government decree has just decided this surveillance and has been entrusted to Shin Bet, the internal intelligence service. The latter intends to rely on ‘advanced technologies generally used in the fight against terrorism,’ explains the daily Haaretz. The aim is to monitor the progress of the disease, to alert people who may have come into contact with a carrier of the virus, and to enforce a quarantine on a case-by-case basis.
Aware that this is a significant intrusion into the privacy of users, the Israeli government specifies in its law that the data collected cannot be used for any purpose other than health and will be erased at the end of the epidemic. Moreover, e-mails and SMS messages would not be monitored. We are reassured.
With this measure, the State of Israel is following in the footsteps of China, which is not only geolocating the sick but also carrying out a probabilistic diagnosis. As a New York Times article showed, every citizen has a mobile application that records movements and displays the risk of having been contaminated using a color code that must be shown to the police. If the result is red, you’re stuck.
In South Korea, mobile applications are also used to geolocate patients, but voluntarily. With apps such as “Corona 100m”, “Corona Doctor” or “Corona Map,” users can see if there are many positive cases in the vicinity and thus adapt their behavior.
These countries are not the only ones looking into mobile geolocation. In Germany, the Hanover Medical University is working with the start-up Ubilabs to develop GeoHealth, a mobile application that, like Chinese software, records movements and indicates the level of risk with color-coding. The head of the Robert Koch Institute of Epidemiology fully endorses this approach, as he believes it would make it possible to combat the spread of the virus better.
In the United States, several projects are emerging. That is the case, for example, of the CoEpi and MIT/Private Kit projects. All these initiatives raise many questions. Who collects the data, and how is it stored? How can we be sure that they are not used for something else? And then, is it efficient?
Indeed, mobile geolocation has, at best, the accuracy of only about ten meters, whereas the coronavirus does not spread beyond a few meters. It is also challenging to take into account all the previous passages of potential patients who could have soiled an object in the surrounding area. But this track seems nevertheless interesting, provided that you don’t think you are Big Brother.
