How safe is the COVIDsafe app? The truth will set you free
When an IT Director revealed to me the true power of technology, it became clear that the positively intended COVIDsafe app should be the least of our concerns.
THE HARD WORD’S THOUGHT LEADER INSIGHT SERIES IS INSPIRED BY MOMENTS FROM OUR REGULAR INTERVIEWS WITH THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST IN BUSINESS.
Technology is wonderful and frightening at once. One of the things that makes us so suspicious of new offerings is the fact that technology’s rate of advancement has far outstripped our ability to understand it. We typically fear what we don’t understand.
Fax machines, for instance, made some sort of sense. Email was a simple enough concept. But then along came artificial intelligence, location tracking, assisted and synthetic GPS, cell ID, RSSI, near-field communication and more. Personalised and personally targeted technology long ago shifted into a realm that nobody could ever fully understand and that few will therefore ever be completely comfortable with.
Recently an IT director in the headquarters of a multinational brand described to me the insights offered by the newly developed technology in their bricks-and-mortar retail outlets [I can’t yet identify the individual or the brand because the story is not yet published, but the release of the COVIDsafe app, and the bizarre reactions of some people to that app, made this knowledge very timely]. He turned to his laptop screen and revealed that in one of their stores right now - in a shop located approximately 700 kilometres from the head office - there were 39 people. Of these shoppers, 15 were male and 24 female. Yesterday, at the same time, there were just 19 customers in the store.
Exactly 12 of today’s shoppers were return customers, he said, and of those, seven had spent over $100 during their last visit. Heat maps showed where in the store customers spent the most time and also clearly revealed the most common routes customers took through the shop.
As if that wasn’t creepy enough, he then told me 15 of the shoppers were married and another 10 were single. Approximately 30 per cent earned over $80,000 per year and three drove cars that were worth over $100,000. Around 25 per cent had university degrees and almost 50 per cent did not study anything beyond high school. While he was unable to access their home addresses, he knew to a fairly good level of accuracy the part of town they were from.
Technology makes us an open book
The IT boffin was happy to show me more, but he paused, clearly concerned about the fact that my jaw was on the floor.
“How can you possibly know all of this?” I asked.
It’s quite simple, he explained, and it’s no more or less than online retailers know about an individual when they shop via the web. And it’s very similar to the amount your employer knows about you, too.
First of all, there are facial recognition cameras set up in the store that help staff to personalise service for each customer. If the system tells a staff member that the shopper bought a specific pair of shoes two weeks ago, perhaps the customer might now be interested in socks. Or if the shopper bought a product that has since been identified as having had a quality assurance problem, the staff member could help them out in advance by pre-warning them and telling them to visit the store for an immediate replacement of the product, etc. It brings to real-world shops the sort of excellent, individualised customer service we’ve come to expect from leading web-based brands such as Uber, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify.
What about the other information - the marital status and income, etc? How can the system possibly know all of this?
That’s simple too, he said. Everybody carries a mobile phone. That phone gives off WiFi and Bluetooth signals and identifiers that are then matched up, in real time, with data from social networks, chat services, search engines and thousands of other data harvesting systems that identify, define and neatly pigeonhole us into lookalike groups.
All of this comes from simply carrying a mobile phone.
Then along comes COVIDsafe, an app with such strict data fences that it’s positively pathetic compared to what’s already being done to service and surveil us, and suddenly some people feel the government is out to get them.
Understanding COVIDsafe
As mentioned above, fear often stems from a lack of understanding. We no longer trust technology because we don’t understand it, and that makes absolute sense.
So when faced with a new technology that is being heavily marketed by our own government to keep us safe, we push back. Rather than doing our own research, we look for others who share our opinion, mostly on social media, and we consider that their alignment with our beliefs makes our beliefs true. And that’s fine, too. After all, data told us that certain people would react that way.
But facts, and the understanding that comes from them, make things far less fear-inducing.
For example, the COVIDsafe app works through Bluetooth, a short-range, wireless technology, by recording when your phone is in close proximity to another person’s phone. It only works when the app is open on screen or in the background, and it deletes all of its own data, 21 days after it is recorded.
Data in the app is stored on your phone, and only on your phone. It’s encrypted, so even you can’t access it.
But if you’re diagnosed with COVID-19, and only if you give health officials permission, that encrypted data can be uploaded to a secure information storage system. Here, it is decrypted. Authorities use it to let individuals know they’ve potentially been close enough to an infected person to have contracted the disease, meaning steps can be quickly taken to test and treat those people, to isolate cases and protect the community.
When the app is deleted from a phone, so is all of the data.
Finally, the data cannot be used to enforce any laws. So even if you’re a henchman in a drug cartel, or you’re having numerous extra-marital affairs, or you recently and shamelessly joined an early-morning queue at Costco to panic-purchase a supersized crate of toilet paper, nobody will ever discover your dirty secrets. Not through the COVIDsafe app, at least.
The argument that “we’re being tracked anyway, so this app is fine,” is not a good one. However, a thorough understanding of an issue allows for a properly educated decision. In this case, the correct decision is obvious.
