The Early 21st Century Car Crash

The UK's NHSX contact tracing app is around the corner and it's going to be absolutely fundamental to our lockdown freedom. The app is designed to let users know if they have been in contact (or within 2 metres for more than 15 minutes) with someone who has recently been tested positive for COVID-19.

There are 19 countries that have already implemented contact tracing apps, including Australia, Colombia, Ghana, India, Israel, Latvia and Singapore. It seems to be well known that technology is key to pressing the brakes in this pandemic car crash. In fact, technology can be the key to preventing outbreaks in the first place.

The technology is right in front of us, ready to use to contain outbreaks, and improve our healthcare system globally. Our human distractions are causing us to crash instead of allowing the technology to fulfil its potential in containing the outbreak.

Illustration: Corona Crash by Faye Schuster

The UK is slow to exploit modern technology's potential, we might as well use 1665 Great Plague technology in the meantime. You know, bales of hay on poles outside infected homes, and having people carry white poles if they have an infected family member.

Whilst the UK is still figuring it out, Israel for example, has a whole website dedicated to pandemic-related technology, showcasing devices that can 'smell' the presence of the virus and also technology that can correlate people's voices with having COVID-19 symptoms.

Other countries have not only hit the brakes, they have pulled the hand-brake too, and have taken their car to the garage to start fixing the damage.

So what's distracting the UK from implementing relatively simple, modern-day technology that would allow us to hit the brake peddle too?

Well, there's a lot of talk about privacy concerns

The BBC reported that security flaws found in the NHSX app, whilst being piloted in the Isle of Wight, 'pose risks to users privacy and could be abused to prevent contagion alerts being sent'. They also said that the data could, in theory, be used to find out if two or more people have met up and therefore could provide clues as to whether someone is having an affair - which is obviously a key factor to consider when developing an app that will essentially be the key to our quarantine freedom. Please sense the sarcasm there.

At the end of the day, the reason why we are anxious to give up more of our privacy is because of the human risk - that is, the risk that a group of individuals may, for some reason, decide to abuse the system and prevent people from getting alerts to self-isolate.

On a larger scale, the human risk is that people might sell data to the black market, which is currently one of the reasons why private companies in China don't want to hand over even more user data to their Government.

Yes, the human risk exists, however, we must put that in perspective against the technological potential to improve our day-to-day lifestyles and to save more lives.

The introduction of the Internet was initially feared because of the risk that it would be used as a tool to facilitate criminal behaviour, that risk hasn't gone away, we just have better regulations and laws.

Similarly, the contact tracing app will have to be accompanied by 'new legal protections to prevent officials using the data for purposes other than identifying those at risk of being infected'. Australia has served its contact tracing app with a side of 'very strict limits about deleting its [contact-tracing] app data at the end of the crisis', thus reducing the human risk of the data being leaked and/or abused against one another.

A slippery slope to a surveillance state?

Our location is probably one of the most sensitive pieces of data we could ever share. The first instinct is naturally, to protect it. Hence our parent's natural instinct to warn us to go on Ghost-mode when Snap-Map was released because the University of Whatsapp kindly alerted them.

We are forgetting that the UK is already one of the most surveilled countries on earth. After Edwards Snowden alerted us about the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, no one revolted. Instead, the invasive powers were written into UK law – now known as the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA).

Not to mention, practically every time we post a story on social media or use Google Maps for directions we are voluntarily releasing data about our location. So if ya'll are ok about sacrificing some privacy to share your latte's and nature walks you should be ok with doing it in the name of health and quarantine freedom.

We are already living in a covert surveillance state. The only reason it's not overt is because our government wouldn't be able to implement our beloved Neo-Liberal economic structure - since there's nothing liberal about in-your-face surveillance.

A land where privacy does not exist

So surely, in a country where those concerns don't exist, technology is thriving and bettering the human experience every day!? Let's say, China? the country where you're not allowed to be concerned about privacy or surveillance?

Don't be fooled, they have their own hindrance to technological potential. Political motives. China is perfectly set up - not only for contact tracing, but also for pandemic prediction.

In 2008, Google launched a pandemic-prediction project called Google Flu Trends, which would use flu-related Google search entries to predict flu outbreaks. It was heavily restricted in the name of privacy and even dropped in 2015. This is despite the fact that it predicted an influenza spike in the US 2 weeks before the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention did back in 2009. As we are all avid coronavirus experts by now, we know that a matter of weeks can make all the difference in order to control and contain an outbreak.

This technology thrives from the freedom of information, thirsty for not only search engine entries but also social media, emails and text messages. All it looks for is evidence that people are chatting about flu-related topics, not so much toilet paper but more like you googling "flu symptoms" or texting your friends "sorry can't come out, I have a sore throat".

Thus, if China fed a 'China Flu Trends' machine with all their surveillance data they could easily predict flu outbreaks.

The hypothetical China Flu Trends outbreak algorithm would have been capable of detecting the flux in internet searches in Wuhan in early January, and perhaps more specifically, it would have detected Li Wenliang WeChat message warning his friends of an unknown virus.

Albeit, that wouldn’t be enough to overcome the political obstacles that exist in China, such a system would have to have direct contact with the World Health Organisation (or perhaps the world leaders since WHO seem to have questionable priorities also).

"the human driver is the Chinese government that failed to warn us of the pandemic in a timely fashion, and the self-driving car that got rear-ended is the technological potential to contain the pandemic by warning us of an outbreak"

Humans love to rear-end technology's potential

The way that privacy concerns, surveillance state paranoia and questionable political motives all hinder the technological potential to improve the human experience reminds me of our impressive track record of rear-ending self-driving cars.

In the first 6 years of testing the self-driving Google car it got into 14 accidents, 11 of which were due to being rear-ended by a human. A physical representation of humans disrupting the path towards a revolutionized human experience, merely due to one of many possible distractions whilst driving.

The irony continuously repeats itself. The 2020 version sees the human driver as the Chinese government that failed to warn us of the pandemic in a timely fashion, and the self-driving car that got rear-ended is the technological possibilities to predict virus outbreaks, in a timely fashion. The human distraction here, however, was questionable political motives.

The result has been slightly more catastrophic than 11 damaged self-driving cars. The result has been the car crash that is our current lives - in case you live under a rock, that is a pandemic and a nearing recession worse than one ever recorded.

The UK is disappointingly slow at picking up the pieces as we ourselves have also rear-ended technological potential due to privacy concern distractions. In the meantime, China has managed to take their car to the garage and back as if nothing ever happened or at least, has pretended to.

And if that analogy wasn't enough - we all need to stop being Frozone's wife and just let technology act for the greater good. That way, we can begin to shift to the inevitable era in the 21st century where technology improves the human experience without interference from unreasonable human distractions.

Illustration: Corona Car by Faye Schuster