Automated contact tracing — a tool that could potentially help blunt the impact of the next wave of the coronavirus pandemic as well as future outbreaks — has been largely sidelined due to privacy concerns and citizens' lack of trust in both government agencies and technology companies, according to a variety of experts.
Only 21% of people would willingly share data with healthcare businesses for contact-tracing purposes, and more than half continue to feel uncomfortable sharing personal data for any reason, according to the "2020 Consumer Trust and Data Privacy report" published this week by enterprise privacy firm Privitar. Because automated contact tracing requires significant market penetration to be effective, the absence of privacy protections and the lack of trust means the technology will likely not be adopted quickly enough to be a factor in the current pandemic.
To gain citizens' trust, the technologies and policies surrounding those technologies must protect privacy and be totally transparent in how data is collected and used, says Guy Cohen, head of policy for Privitar.
"If we want to take advantage of tools like contact-tracing apps, we need to make sure those tools work and are trustworthy — otherwise they won't be adopted," he says. "We need evidence of value and trustworthy data management needs to be both perception and reality."
A failure to trust the technology is not the only challenge for contract-tracing applications. False positives — identifying a person as a potential transmission risk — could be a significant issue, as the technologies used to determine proximity — Wi-Fi and Bluetooth — do not take dete ..
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