There’s an app for that

The corona pandemic seems to be bringing out the authoritarian in me. I simply cannot wrap my head around why anybody would refuse to sacrifice a little privacy if that means we can better control the spread of the virus. Don’t people want to lessen their chances of infection? Wouldn’t they like to leave their houses more often? And, more importantly, don’t they want to keep their jobs? Aren’t these the same people that are more than happy to hand over their data to Google and Facebook for services that are trivial compared to containing a pandemic?

Before you ask: yes, I did read George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four. And I know that China’s rulers are now trying to copy it. But we don’t live in Oceania or China. We live in a country that’s capable of striking the right balance between deploying technology to contain the virus and shoring up some civil liberties, now that these most extraordinary of circumstances call for it.

Enter Bluetooth tracking, which has been put forward as a relatively privacy-friendly way of detecting possible infection events. Using anonymous identifiers, smartphones would detect which other smartphones they get into proximity with, and keep a local record of about 14 days (the maximum incubation period of the virus). When a person tests positive, his or her identifier is released to the public, allowing all users to scan for that ID in their database. If it’s in there, you know you might have been exposed, but not where, when and by whom.