Contact Tracing Apps Violate Privacy
Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
·
The Rockefeller Foundation’s white paper, “National COVID-19
Testing Action Plan” lays out a strategic framework that is clearly intended to
become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that
severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice
·
Contact-tracing apps are a significant part of this scheme, and
the Rockefeller plan clearly states that “Whenever and wherever possible data
should be open,” and that “privacy concerns must be set aside”
·
The U.S. is rapidly adopting an artificial intelligence-driven
mass surveillance system rivaling that of China, and legal and structural
obstacles are being swept away under the guise of combating COVID-19
·
Contact-tracing apps require you to keep your cellphone on your
person throughout the day, giving thousands of third parties access to personal
data
·
Privacy protects people from interference, intervention and
manipulation, and must be protected at all costs
Two days
ago, I wrote about The Rockefeller Foundation’s plan to
test, track and trace all Americans — ostensibly to prevent COVID-19 from
overwhelming us as we’re again “allowed” to venture outside our front doors in
limited capacity around the nation.
The
Rockefeller Foundation’s April 21, 2020, white paper,1 “National
COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our
Communities,” lays out a strategic framework that is clearly intended to become
part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely
limits personal liberty and freedom of choice.
The
Rockefeller plan calls for COVID-19 testing and tracing of 1 million Americans
per week to start, incrementally ramping it up to 3 million and then 30 million
per week (the “1-3-30 plan”) over the next six months until the entire
population has been covered.
Test
results would then be collected on a digital platform capable of tracking all
tested individuals so that contact-tracing can be performed when someone tests
positive.
Contact-tracing
apps are a significant part of this scheme, and the white paper2 clearly
states that “Whenever and wherever possible data should be open,” and that
“Some privacy concerns must be set aside for an infectious agent as virulent as
Covid-19, allowing the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and
validated in a few required settings and many voluntary ones.”
Techno-Tyranny
Steps Into Broad Daylight
As noted
in The Last American Vagabond’s article,3 “Techno-Tyranny:
How the U.S. National Security State Is Using Coronavirus to Fulfill an
Orwellian Vision,” the U.S. is rapidly adopting an artificial
intelligence-driven mass surveillance system rivaling that of China, and legal
and structural obstacles are now being swept away “under the guise of combating
the coronavirus crisis.”
Indeed,
the Rockefeller plan doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and
intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it. In the first half
of the 20th century, George Orwell wrote a dystopian novel, “Nineteen
Eighty-Four,” in which the government controlled every aspect of a person’s
life, including their very thoughts.
Today,
scientists seem intent on turning Orwell’s nightmarish vision into reality,
using the COVID-19 pandemic, national security and public health as their
justification for doing so. Artificial intelligence — AI — is a key ingredient
in this surveillance plot. Ironically, as noted by The Last American Vagabond:4
“Last
year, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence
can ‘address the national security and defense needs of the United States’
discussed in detail the ‘structural’ changes that the American economy and
society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China,
according to a recent document5 acquired
through a FOIA request.
This
document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in
many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass
surveillance.
This
perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S.
government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese
government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and
other technologies as a major ‘threat’ to Americans’ ‘way of life.’6”
The
document7 the article refers to was produced by the National Security
Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), a government organization
created by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2018.
Its
purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the
development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and associated
technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs
of the United States,” and to ensure the U.S. maintains a technological
advantage.
To that
end, the NSCAI is pushing for an overhaul of the American way of life and
economy in order to usher in a more comprehensive AI-driven surveillance
apparatus.
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Google Is
a Major Player and Threat in This Arena
It is
important to understand that Google has the greatest AI team in the world. To
boost its powerbase, in 2014 Google purchased Deep Mind, an AI company that
employed some of the world’s leading AI experts at the time.8
One of
those top-notch scientists was David Silver, who led the team that created the
program Alpha Go, which subsequently defeated the world champion of the
abstract boardgame, Go.9 Most recently, Silver
won the 2019 Association for Computing Machinery award for breakthrough
advances in computer game-playing.10
Lex
Fridman from MIT recently had a fascinating interview with Silver.11 The
reason I mention it is because this accomplishment is perceived by many as a
great milestone. It established deep reinforcement learning as a strategy that
will allow computers to rapidly outperform humans and rapidly implement
advanced versions of the surveillance state.
So, not
only does Google have the AI scientists, but they also have the largest
computing platform in the world and a major lead in quantum computing, already
establishing quantum supremacy late last year.12
We Cannot
Afford To Be Naïve
The DW
News video above reviews the rollout of COVID-19 contact tracing apps in
various parts of the world and their approaches to privacy concerns. Germany,
at present, appears to be one of the nations that are most protective of their
privacy rights. This makes perfect sense, considering its Nazi history.
Many
Americans, on the other hand, do not have personal experience with the kind of
human rights atrocities perpetuated in Nazi Germany, and fail to understand
just how slippery the slope is.
Recent
calls by American leaders to call police and snitch on their neighbors for
failing to observe social distancing rules, for example, come straight from the
authoritarian handbook, and there’s simply no excuse for not recognizing and
interpreting it at face value.
Rights
and liberties are never simply handed to us. Every single human right and
freedom you currently enjoy has been fought and paid for in blood, and unless
we refuse tyranny from the very get-go, we’ll eventually be forced to live
under it or pay for our freedom with blood sacrifices yet again. We cannot
afford to be naïve about where we’re headed.
Contact
Tracing Apps Violate Your Privacy
A May 4,
2020, Forbes article13 by Simon Chandler points out that while contact-tracing apps
“may be cryptographically secure,” they still “threaten our privacy in broader
and more insidious ways.”
“On the
one hand, cybersecurity researchers have already argued14 that
suitably determined and malevolent bad actors could correlate infected people
with other personal info using the API. On the other, the Google-Apple API and
any app based on it carry two much more general and dangerous privacy risks,” Chandler
writes.
What are
some of these privacy risks? Well, for starters, contact-tracing apps require
you to keep your cellphone on your person throughout the day, regardless of
what you’re doing.
Aside
from whatever concerns people may have about electromagnetic field exposure
from their cellphone being on their body while turned on — which is no small
concern in and of itself — your cellphone also tracks and shares countless
other data that is unrelated to the COVID-19 app.
As noted
by Chandler, “A Washington Post study15 from
last year discovered around 5,400 (mostly app-based) data trackers on an
iPhone, all of which were sending data back to third-parties,” and “all of
these companies have an interest in using that data to later influence and
indirectly control your behavior …”
Privacy
Is About Preventing Interference and Manipulation
Chandler
makes another very important point that many fail to remember when it comes to
privacy:16
“Privacy
actually gains most of its importance and value because it protects people from
interference and intervention. You may want to keep your fondness for, say,
ballet dancing private from your neighbors, because of the risk that they might
mock your pastime and make you feel ashamed about wanting to be a ballet
dancer.
You worry
that they will interfere — either directly or indirectly — with your ability to
develop as a person according to your own awareness and conception of your best
interests. Exactly the same thing goes for privacy in the context of
smartphones and digital technology.
It’s not
enough to avoid sharing your data with the ‘wrong’ people (as opposed to scores
or hundreds of ‘legitimate’ third parties). You also need to avoid interference
and intervention to have true privacy. And in encouraging people to have their
smartphones with them all the time, coronavirus contact-tracing apps fail
abjectly in this test.”
COVID-19
Tracing Apps Set Precedent for Behavior-Control
Contact
tracing apps will also “normalize the concept of apps themselves directing and
managing at scale how millions of people live and behave,” Chandler points out.
The app will notify you whenever you’ve come in close proximity of someone who
tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. You’ll then be advised to self-isolate
for a prescribed amount of time. As reported ty Chandler:17
“This is
a massive problem for anyone concerned about the future of privacy and personal
freedoms in the Digital Age. It would be one thing if any contact-tracing app
could guarantee that a user had definitely been infected with the coronavirus.
But there’s a very strong likelihood that such apps will also send
notifications to lots of people who haven’t been infected …
Coronavirus
contact-tracing apps will end up requiring thousands (if not millions) of
people to quarantine themselves at home unnecessarily. So, in most cases,
rather than preventing coronavirus infections from spreading, the only thing
such apps will achieve is desensitizing the general public to giving up another
chunk of their privacy and personal freedom.”
In other
words, over time, people will get used to the idea of having their day-to-day
activities predicated on what an app tells them to do. A virtually guaranteed
result of this habituation is the handing over of personal judgment and
discernment to an AI. “In the process, they’ll suffer from the kind of outside
interference with their behavior that privacy is meant to defend against,”
Chandler says.
Rockefeller
Plan Is Not Limited to COVID-19 Tracing
The
tracking system The Rockefeller Foundation is calling for in the U.S. also
demands access to other medical data. According to its “National COVID-19
Testing Action Plan”:18
“This
infection database must easily interoperate with doctor, hospital and insurance
health records in an essential and urgent national program to finally
rationalize the disparate and sometimes deliberately isolated electronic
medical records systems across the country …
On March
9, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released two long-awaited
final rules that would prohibit information blocking in health care and advance
more seamless exchange of health care data. But publication in the Federal
Register, necessary to activate the rules, has been inexplicably delayed. This
delay must end.”
In other
words, this plan is far more comprehensive than merely tracking COVID-19 cases.
It’s designed to replace the current system of “disparate and sometimes
deliberately isolated electronic medical records systems across the country.”
Will You
Embrace Totalitarianism for False Sense of Security?
A small
shred of hope still exists that enough Americans will see through this ruse.
Oxford researchers estimate19 that in in order for
contact tracing apps to be effective, about 60% of any given population would
need to participate.
According
to a national poll20,21 conducted
by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland between April 21 and
April 26, 2020, 3 in 5 Americans say they’re either unable or unwilling to
allow silent surveillance by a cellphone app, even in the name of public
health.
One in 6
said they didn’t have a smartphone. Even among Americans that have smartphones
with the appropriate capabilities, about half said they would not participate.
According
to The New York Times,22 only 3% of residents
in North Dakota had downloaded the state’s contact tracing app as of April 29,
2020. The app was announced and released April 7, 2020.23
In
Singapore, only 1 in 6 (20%) had downloaded the government’s contact tracing
app by April 1, 2020,24 while 30% of Norwegians downloaded their government’s app
within the first week of its release, according to The New York Times.25
In an
effort to maintain some semblance of privacy protection, some nations, such as
France, have decided to use “short-range Bluetooth ‘handshakes’ between
devices” and keep the data on centralized servers, while others are opting to
use GPS location data26 and a variety of other systems. A May 5, 2020, article in
Tech Crunch describes the differences between some of them.27
As
reported by BBC News,28 Cannes, France, is also trialing surveillance monitoring
software on buses and outdoor markets to keep tabs on social distancing
compliance. According to the software developer, this surveillance complies
with EU data privacy laws by not storing or transmitting any images or
identifying data.
Cannes
Mayor David Lisnard told BBC: "This technology doesn't identify people but
just gives us mathematical analysis to meet people's needs." Still, if
rules are breached, the AI will send an automatic alert to police and city
authorities.
Apps
Cannot Replace Conventional Disease Tracing
The World
Health Organization, meanwhile, has noted that these types of apps still cannot
replace old-fashioned disease surveillance and tracing measures. As reported by
Reuters:29
“As
countries begin easing lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of the virus, many
hope to contain new clusters of infection through systematic contact tracing,
helped by mobile phone apps and other technology.
But
[WHO’s top emergency expert Dr. Mike] Ryan said these did not make more
traditional ‘boots-on-the-ground’ surveillance redundant. ‘We are very, very
keen to stress that IT tools do not replace the basic public health workforce
that is going to be needed to trace, test, isolate and quarantine,’ he said …”
‘Health
Passports’ Are in the Works
Aside
from the Rockefeller Foundation’s plan for the U.S., other nations are also
proposing the rollout of various types of “health passports,” the oft-repeated
refrain being that without digital health certificates, it simply won’t be safe
to return to work and leisure.
May 5,
2020, Tech Crunch reported30 the rollout of a
contact tracing app in the U.K., developed by the National Health Service. The
first testing ground will be the Isle of Wight, which has a population of about
140,000. According to Tech Crunch:
“The NHS
COVID-19 app uses Bluetooth Low Energy handshakes to register
proximity events (aka ‘contacts’) between smartphone users, with factors such
as the duration of the ‘contact event’ and the distance between the devices
feeding an NHS clinical algorithm that’s being designed to estimate infection
risk and trigger notifications if a user subsequently experiences COVID-19
symptoms …
However
there are major questions over how effective the tool will prove to be,
especially given the government’s decision to ‘go it alone’ on the design of
its digital contacts-tracing system — which raises some specific technical
challenges linked to how modern smartphone platforms operate, as well as around
international interoperability with other national apps targeting the same
purpose.
In
addition, the UK app allows users to self-report symptoms of COVID-19 — which
could lead to many false alerts being generated. That in turn might trigger
notification fatigue and/or encourage users to ignore alerts if the ratio of
false alarms exceeds genuine alerts.”
What’s
more, while the app initially only stores contact events on each individual’s
device, once a user flags him or herself as having symptoms or testing
positive, the contact data is uploaded to a central server that will store the
data indefinitely, and from which it cannot be deleted.
This data
may also be used for public health research, which again raises questions about
privacy and the possibility of re-identification of individuals. May 4, 2020,
The Guardian also reported on U.K. developments:31
“Tech
firms are in talks with ministers about creating health passports to help
Britons return safely to work using coronavirus testing and facial recognition.
Facial biometrics could be used to help provide a digital certificate –
sometimes known as an immunity passport – proving which workers have had
Covid-19 …
The
UK-based firm Onfido, which specializes in verifying people’s identities using
facial biometrics, has delivered detailed plans to the government and is
involved in a number of conversations about what could be rolled out across the
country …
Its
proposals, which have reached pilot stages in other countries, could be
executed within months … The firm could use antibody tests – proving whether
someone has had the virus — or antigen tests, which show current infections.”
Antigen
Testing Cannot Ensure Safety
Why
antigen testing is part of these kinds of “health passports” is a curious
mystery, seeing how unreliable they are, not to mention the fact that testing
for active infection is worthless unless you get retested on a regular basis.
As I mentioned in my Rockefeller plan article, questions that have yet to be
answered include:
·
How often would you have to undergo testing? A negative test today
may not be valid tomorrow, if you happen to come across someone who is infected
between now and then. If regular retesting is not part of the plan, then the
whole system is worthless as your infection status could change at any time.
·
If you are in the vicinity of someone who tests positive in the
near future and are told to quarantine for two weeks, will employers pay for
that time off and guarantee you have a job to come back to afterward?
·
What happens if you quarantine for two weeks but don’t get sick
and test negative for antibodies, then go out and happen across yet another
person who ends up testing positive shortly thereafter? Will you be forced into
quarantine again? Where does it end? And when?
Contact
Tracing Apps May Cause More Problems Than They Solve
An April
27, 2020, article32 by the Brookings Institute lays out some of the many
problems inherent with contact tracing apps. It states, in part:
“We are
concerned by this rising enthusiasm for automated technology as a centerpiece
of infection control. Between us, we hold extensive expertise in technology,
law and policy, and epidemiology. We have serious doubts that voluntary,
anonymous contact tracing through smartphone apps … can free Americans of the
terrible choice between staying home or risking exposure.
We worry
that contact-tracing apps will serve as vehicles for abuse and disinformation,
while providing a false sense of security … We have no doubts that the
developers of contact-tracing apps and related technologies are
well-intentioned. But we urge the developers of these systems to step up and
acknowledge the limitations of those technologies before they are widely
adopted.
Health
agencies and policymakers should not over-rely on these apps and, regardless,
should make clear rules to head off the threat to privacy, equity, and liberty
by imposing appropriate safeguards …
Apps that
notify participants of disclosure could, on the margins and in the right
conditions, help direct testing resources to those at higher risk. Anything
else strikes us as implausible at best, and dangerous at worst.”
The
article goes on to highlight a number of risks, including the fact that contact
tracing apps are imperfect proxies for exposure. They can easily trigger false
positive alerts in situations where the possibility of transmission is
extremely low, such as when the signal has traveled through a wall. People in
different rooms are not at high risk of infection.
The apps
also do not take into account the use of protective gear by the contacts. Also,
the elderly, who might stand to gain the most protection from it, are the least
likely to download the app. Even those who have the app may not always have the
phone on them to catch all contacts, and people might not report symptoms and
positive test results even if they get them.
“Even
among true contact events, most will not lead to transmission,” Brookings says,
citing research showing that despite having about a dozen close contacts each
day, the average person who is infected will only transmit the virus to two or
three others throughout the entire course of their infection. Brookings
continues:
“Because
most exposures flagged by the apps will not lead to infection, many users will
be instructed to self-quarantine even when they have not been infected. A
person may put up with this once or twice, but after a few false alarms and the
ensuing inconvenience of protracted self-isolation, we expect many will start
to disregard the warnings …
Ultimately,
contact tracing is a public health intervention, not an individual health one.
It can reduce the spread of disease through the population, but does not confer
direct protection on any individual.
This
creates incentive problems that need careful thought: What is in it for the
user who will sometimes be instructed to miss work and avoid socializing, but
does not derive immediate benefits from the system? …
And
finally, the issue of malicious use is paramount — particularly given this
current climate of disinformation, astroturfing, and political manipulation.
Imagine an unscrupulous political operative who wanted to dampen voting
participation in a given district, or a desperate business owner who wanted to
stifle competition.
Either
could falsely report incidences of coronavirus without much fear of
repercussion. Trolls could sow chaos for the malicious pleasure of it.
Protesters could trigger panic as a form of civil disobedience. A foreign
intelligence operation could shut down an entire city by falsely reporting
COVID-19 infections in every neighborhood. There are a great many vulnerabilities
underlying this platform that have still yet to be explored.”
- 1, 2, 18 The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)
- 3, 4 The Last American Vagabond April 20, 2020
- 5, 7 Chinese Tech Landscape Overview, NSCAI Presentation May 2019 (PDF)
- 6 Washington Examiner July 20, 2020
- 8 TechCrunch January 26, 2014
- 9 Association for Computing Machinery April 2020
- 10 Association for Computing Machinery April 1, 2020
- 11 YouTube April 3, 2020
- 12 Nature 574, 2019, 505–510
- 13, 16, 17 Forbes May 4, 2020
- 14 Wired April 17, 2020
- 15 Washington Post May 28, 2019
- 19 University of Oxford April 16, 2020
- 20 Washington Post-University of Maryland National Poll April 21-26, 2020
- 21 Washington Post April 29, 2020
- 22, 25 The New York Times April 29, 2020
- 23 North Dakota Health April 7, 2020
- 24 StraitsTimes.com April 1, 2020
- 26 Reuters May 3, 2020
- 27, 30 Tech Crunch May 5, 2020
- 28 BBC News May 4, 2020
- 29 Reuters May 4, 2020
- 31 The Guardian May 4, 2020
- 32 Brookings Institute April 27, 2020
