The Washington Post reported last week the opening of businesses in Georgia has led, unsurprisingly, to a significant increase in out-of-state visitors.[1] About 13% more daily average trips occurred in the week after reopening than the prior week, with most of those trips coming from adjacent states (Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida). An interesting note:
At the time, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee had started to allow most “nonessential” retail stores to reopen, with limitations and requirements to continue social distancing. Tennessee also had begun to allow gyms and most sit-down restaurants to reopen. However, only Georgia had permitted the reopening of dine-in restaurants, gyms, hair salons, barbershops and entertainment venues, such as bowling alleys and movie theaters.
This indicates to me that lockstep reopening between states is going to be required if you really want full buy-in from your neighbors. Governor Kemp has unlocked a sort of prisoner’s dilemma for business activity, where neighboring states risk losing business activity to their neighbors if you don’t match or beat their reopening plan. Of course, if you’re taking the public health seriously (who knows, Governor Kemp doesn’t seem to be!) a huge influx of outsiders coming across your border maybe isn’t ideal.
Since the Dumb Privacy Guy is interested in, you know, privacy, I want to focus on the source of this data. The article makes a halfhearted gesture at the source, which is the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute Covid-19 Impact Analysis Platform.[2] UMD is using “anonymized” location data to track large-scale interstate travel during the pandemic. I always feel like “anonymized location data” is a bit of an oxymoron – location data is pretty easy to pair with its creator if you care to put in the effort. There are only so many people living in my Philadelphia apartment building, and I can’t imagine anyone else regularly commutes to the same law school as me. If you have access to a big database with location data and know even a smidgen about who you’re trying to find, the anonymization is pretty moot.
I say this because the tech companies (and governments) really want to use your location data for contact tracing. The idea behind these services is to use good old Silicon Valley know how to solve a notoriously difficult problem, keeping track of who infected individuals have been in contact with. This is essential for limiting the spread of coronavirus in a world where we have a modicum of freedom outside our homes. BUT (you knew that was coming) early evidence from Singapore suggests only 25% adoption of the voluntary app, low enough that it was not useful to make a difference in tackling the second wave of corona in the city.[3]
Can we imagine US citizens voluntarily signing up for a location-sharing app, whose explicit stated purpose is to share where you go and who you talk to with the government? I say no. Maybe if you couched it as a fun dance social media platform. Conspiracy theories (looking at you Plandemic) already abound under the current lockdown. Fears of government surveillance are deeply ingrained in the American psyche[4] and are an explicit platform of right wing agitation.
There’s a reason tracing is the second element of test and trace. Like all other aspects of the U.S.’s coronavirus response, our inability to get priorities straight is leading us to focus on a technological solution that will not replace the need for physical, real-world testing. If we took widescale testing seriously, as doctors are telling us to,[5] we could rely on accurate metrics to open up the nation in a logical and safe manner. A widespread surveillance architecture does us no good if we stop testing so we can pretend everything is ok.[6]
As Steven Levy wrote in his Plaintext newsletter last Friday, there’s pretty much one story arc in tech:
Idealistic founder(s) has crazy idea suddenly made possible by tech advances → things turn out weird/wrong/disastrous
Contact tracing seems to be following this familiar arc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/smartphone-data-shows-out-of-state-visitors-flocked-to-georgia-as-restaurants-and-other-businesses-reopened/2020/05/06/b1db0056-8faf-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html?utm_campaign=The%20Interface&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter.
[2] https://data.covid.umd.edu/findings/index.html. As an aside, a lot of news articles do this thing where they half-heartedly cite their sources but don’t do it clearly enough for someone like me to directly go to the source. Why would you make it hard when the source is an academic institution? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING? Counterpoint: I found the source relatively quickly through a google search.
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/05/12/forget-apple-and-google-contact-tracing-apps-just-dealt-serious-new-blow/#6bad29a42172
[4] See all of Fourth Amendment case law.
[5] https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-has-covid-19-what-we-know-about-tests-for-the-new-coronavirus-11585868185?mod=article_inline
[6] https://twitter.com/SophiaTesfaye/status/1255996287167725568?s=20
Dumb Privacy Guy 