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Saturday, October 3, 2020

The COVID Alert app is a key tool in our fight against the virus. But a profound mistrust in big tech is leading Canadians to avoid it - Toronto Star

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Every morning at about half past 10, I get a slightly sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe you do, too. That’s when the number of new COVID-19 cases in Ontario is announced. As the rate of infections has shot up, it’s hard not to be struck with anxiety.

We have tools to combat the virus — social distancing, masks, handwashing — and, of course, the COVID Alert app made available by the federal government.

But the app has seen disappointing uptake. By last count at the beginning of September, it was at only 2.2 million downloads in Ontario, a province of nearly 15 million people. With a second wave of the pandemic decidedly here, why are we avoiding one of the key tools to help us fight it?

We can guess at least one reason: a profound mistrust of tech, born of the surveillance and privacy failures of our current tech environment. With so many people suspicious of how technology keeps track of them, even helpful, well-intentioned programs can get hijacked by the way tech has become untrustworthy.

Strangely enough, where privacy is concerned, the COVID Alert app is actually rather good. Built on joint technology from both Apple and Google, the app works by sending out randomized, anonymous codes that are read by other phones. If someone marks themselves as having tested positive for COVID-19, anyone who has come into contact with them is notified of potential exposure. The information isn’t sent to any sort of central database, and no identifying information is shared. The focus on privacy also means that we do not know how many people have been notified of potential exposure.

It’s not perfect. Because the app relies on Bluetooth, the same technology used for earpieces and wireless headphones, it can mistakenly register exposure — say, through walls of an apartment building where someone might technically be 10 feet away, but there has been no exposure.

Nonetheless, compared to most of the apps we use on our phones, it’s extremely private. But how are people to trust that?

Consider that the major apps we use — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on — not only openly track us, but do so as the core part of their business model, making tracking and smartphone use seem synonymous.

Then there are the gaffes in privacy or social responsibility: Google workers hearing conversations recorded by people’s smartspeakers, Facebook’s role in spreading coronavirus misinformation, the murky questions surrounding TikTok’s relationship to the Chinese governing party. There is a persistent sense that you can never quite trust what big tech is doing.

This is to say nothing of the broader culture of surveillance enabled by tech: the use of Amazon’s Ring cameras to track what goes on near one’s front door; tracking software to proctor exams during the COVID-19 home-schooling period; or, more simply, the wider social deployment of such technologies in conjunction with governments and the police. Just this fall, Amazon announced a new drone that flies around one’s home, ostensibly to record potential intrusions.

Quite simply, modern digital technology has fostered distrust because it so regularly tracks our behaviour while also cultivating a culture of watchfulness and surveillance.

Is it any wonder then that when presented with an app — the explicit purpose of which appears to be tracking a person’s health — that people are hesitant to download it?

If private enterprise has corrupted the once promising potential of tech by turning it into an ominous, seemingly ever-watchful eye, it is not the only target of blame.

After all, in ceding so much of social and cultural life to big tech companies, governments have also allowed them to dominate the cultural response to tech — that the tools we use to work, socialize and inform ourselves are so often seen as being caught up in this privacy-invading approach, rather than being thought of as helpful, productive, new.

This is a deeply strange and untenable situation. In almost all other significant aspects of life, there is a role for the state to play in offering the basic stuff of life: utilities, roads and the broader infrastructure that underpins the economy and cultural life.

Perhaps it is time that the government also play a role in digital life by offering basic digital services as part of its public obligation — be it straightforward things like email or calendars, or a suite of apps related to government functions that would protect privacy as a core principle. These measures may act as a counterbalance to the domination of tech tracking giants.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, there will be times when we collectively need to rely on technology to address the challenges of modern life. That requires trust — something that Facebook, Google, Amazon et al have all too successfully undermined.

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What if instead one could use their phone without a sinking feeling they are being watched and tracked?

And what if the bodies we elect to represent us were the ones to help us reclaim that trust?

Navneet Alang
Navneet Alang is a Toronto-based freelance contributing technology columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @navalang

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"avoid it" - Google News
October 03, 2020 at 09:03PM
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The COVID Alert app is a key tool in our fight against the virus. But a profound mistrust in big tech is leading Canadians to avoid it - Toronto Star
"avoid it" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3844a1y
https://ift.tt/2SzWv5y

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