Should governments or health care regulators collect anonymized data and store it in one central database, or take a more decentralized approach, allowing computations to occur on people’s individual devices?
As countries around the world struggle to track the spread of coronavirus infections using cellphone data, a debate has developed over a technical issue related to privacy:
Where cryptographers and security experts diverge is on where those anonymous bits of information, linked to individual cellphones, should be stored. Some argue the information should be pushed out to a central server managed by a trustworthy government or health care entity, while others insist that data remain on individual devices.
The group sent an open letter on April 19 urging countries to adopt a Bluetooth-enabled model without a central database to prevent “mission creep,” or what they describe as “a form of government or private sector surveillance that would catastrophically hamper trust in and acceptance of such an application” because it could be used to reconstruct movements of groups of individuals over time.
For example, the French government is interested in pursuing the centralized model. It’s called the “Stop COVID” app, which would ideally push information about contact tracing continuously to a central repository managed by countries’ health organizations. However, Apple’s technology, which prevents Bluetooth information from leaving the device while it’s locked, is creating a hurdle.
Additionally, researchers are pushing governments and developers from all sides to create transparent, open-source solutions that can be analyzed by the broader community. In Norway, the government at first refused to provide the code for its contact tracing app, arguing that releasing it would be a “security risk,” according to a developer named Glenn Henriksen, who posted on Twitter.
If governments and app developers want their solutions to work for the largest number of users, explained Larus, they may need to follow Google and Apple’s lead, though he said it’s likely every country will have its own solution. “I think that in the end if Apple holds to this line, which I think they will, that pretty well settles the debate,” said Larus.
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