'Americans are right to be skeptical of this': Coronavirus contact tracing could threaten privacy, employment, and health resources say some experts

• Lawmakers and other experts warn that a surveillance system for tracing coronavirus exposure poses serious ethical and potentially legal problems.
• Earlier in April, Apple and Google announced a new smartphone application for contact tracing, which will be voluntary.
• But "Americans are right to be skeptical of this project," said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican.
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In the United States, the coronavirus "curve" has not yet flattened. Even so, some officials, business owners, and workers are anxious to restart the economy. Major tech rivals Apple and Google have proposed a solution, seeking to thread the needle between public health and economic activity by deploying a contact-tracing system.

The system, which could be implemented by mid-May, will use smartphone Bluetooth capabilities to track and alert people who have come in contact with a COVID-positive person.

Although the application will not be compulsory, according to the Silicon Valley giants, lawmakers and experts across the country are concerned that it is fraught with ethical and legal problems.

"What I am afraid of is some folks in the tech community will use this huge public need as a way to be invasive with private data and create a beachfront in the health sector," Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), himself a tech entrepreneur, told the Los Angeles Times.

"It is not like the big platforms are coming at this with clean hands," Warner added, alluding to the tech industry's tendentious record on data collection and surveillance.

Apple and Google are keen to allay fears about the industry's practices, however, and experts like Michael Veale, a professor of digital rights and regulation at University College London, have lauded the companies' decision to make the virus-surveillance system voluntary.

"This is a very effective power play in favor of privacy by Apple and Google," Veale told the Wall Street Journal. "They have made a very conscious decision against very centralized databases, while still giving epidemiologists the data they need."

"It is a trivial intrusion on our liberty as citizens when you compare it to all the other things during this pandemic where we have said, 'This is necessary, we will do it,'" Stewart Baker, assistant secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, told the Los Angeles Times.

Employment, smartphone ownership, and privacy rights come to the fore

Even so, "Americans are right to be skeptical of this project," said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican.

"Too often, Americans have been burned by companies who calculated that the profits they could gain by reversing privacy pledges would outweigh any later financial penalty," he wrote in a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google's parent company, Alphabet, last week.

He challenged them to demonstrate their intentions by claiming personal responsibility for the surveillance application.

"If you seek to assure the public, make your stake in this project personal," he said. "Make a commitment that you and other executives will be personally liable if you stop protecting privacy, such as by granting advertising companies access to the interface once the pandemic is over."

The application will only be used during the pandemic, the companies said. But it's unclear when the health emergency will be over. Social distancing could be necessary "into 2022," according to Harvard University researchers, and "a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024."

Even if the application is voluntary now, some fear it could become a condition of employment, according to Ashkan Soltani, the Federal Trade Commission's chief technologist during the Barack Obama administration.

Soltani worried about the possibility that employers would be alerted to "whether you have been in contact with someone who has been infected," Soltani told the Los Angeles Times.

Other issues abound. Poor people, elderly people, black Americans, and Hispanics are all disproportionately likely not to own a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center, preventing them from being counted in the contract tracing project.

Heavy reliance on a system requiring smartphone ownership could overlook potential hot spots where fewer people own the devices. Discrimination could be baked into the system, the ACLU warned in a white paper released earlier this month.

Others, like privacy researcher Maciej Cegłowski, acknowledge the risks of a surveillance application, while emphasizing the urgency of the pandemic.

"The terrifying surveillance infrastructure this project requires exists and is maintained in good working order in the hands of private industry, where it is entirely unregulated and is currently being used to try to sell people skin cream," wrote Cegłowski. "Why not use it to save lives?"