Tracking The Coronavirus? If There's An App For That, Young People Will Download It

Young folks are down to be tracked if they test positive for COVID-19.


According to a new poll from The Economist/YouGov, 47 percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 mentioned they would install an app on their phone that would let them to anonymously alert people who have been near them if they had tested positive for COVID-19, and would let them to be alerted if they had been close to someone else who tests positive. Only 29 percent of respondents from the same age order mentioned they would not install a COVID-19 smartphone tracking app. (That response is much higher than the general population, of which only 35 percent mentioned they’d be prepared to install an app that could alert people to their positive COVID-19 test.)


And young folks are far less likely than the general population and older adults to be able to see these apps as an invasion of privacy. Case in point, two-thirds of the respondents mentioned once choosing between public safety and civil liberties, they’d pick public safety, even if that indicates limiting some civil liberties.


This poll, which took place from April 19-April 21, comes just days before the government launched a contract with Palantir Technologies to design a database tracking the spread of the coronavirus around the country, the Day-to-day Beast first announced. You could know Palantir by its founder Peter Thiel, the conservative billionaire founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, who notoriously sued Gawker out of business.


The company’s new project — currently called Project Right now — will be piece of the Department of Health and Human Services and will pull information from federal, state, and local governments, universities, and medical facilities according to Gizmodo. It’s a try to “mitigate and prevent spread” of the coronavirus, a HHS spokesperson instructed them Day-to-day Beast, nevertheless is being faced with public backlash as Palantir already has contracts with federal law enforcement organizations, most infamously Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where the firm has helped the organization raid immigrant communities. Palantir has also helped the National Security Corporation spy on people, offered assistance to the Pentagon to help soldiers in the field, and helped enforce crackdowns from the NYC Office of Special Enforcement, Gizmodo reported.


“We are using the information aggregated... To paint a picture for the Task Force, and state and local leaders to show the impact of their tactical decisions,” a HHS spokesperson instructed them Day-to-day Beast, adding that Project Right now draws from 187 statistics sources including everything from the distribution of medical supplies to hospital capacity and inventories to testing statistics. “For instance, if there really are a couple of cases concentrated at a hospital next to an airport plus a mass transit stop, we can construct a predictive model using a transmission chain to predict how speedily the infection will spread taking into account these factors.”


This sort of tracker isn’t particularly new to countries like Israel, which tapped into a vast trove of previously undisclosed cellphone statistics originally gathered under the guise of counter-terrorism according to the New York Times, and South Korea, which used a smart-phone tracking app. Palanatir itself has pandemic modeling contracts in countless other countries, including the United Kingdom and Greece, according to the Wall Street Journal.


While Palantir might be the only organization contracted out by the United States government to make design a virus tracking app, other tech platforms are creating them, also. Both Google and Apple reported a system for tracking the spread of the virus when users share statistics over Bluetooth Low Energy transmissions and approved apps, the Verge announced. That system is purely voluntary and will keep massive amounts of statistics on phones that have been in close physical proximity of each other. Users self-report if they have been tested, and what the result of that test was; that statistics can be accessed by public health authorities. The system, which is scheduled to be released in mid-May, alerts people with the app if they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. At first, users will have to manually download the app; nevertheless, agencies are working on building tracing functionality into the operating system, making it automatically built onto every iOS or Android phone.


Some of this statistics is contingent on the idea that people can and will be tested, which is a uphill battle of its own. For months, the U.S. Has largely faltered in its testing capabilities, and ramp-up efforts are elaborate and slow-moving. Currently, doctors are reserving tests for people who present indications and are in key at-risk groups: people who “we basically know have it,” Dr. Darien Sutton-Ramsey, an emergency physician in New York, previously told MTV News.


all of the while, privacy advocates are worried that trading in rights for safety is neither a smart nor safe move for the future of democracy. In a joint statement on April 2, more than 100 civil and digital rights organizations across the world, including urged that any government’s try to surveil people in the age of coronavirus-tracking should respect human rights.


“Technology can and should play an essential role while in this task to save lives, like to spread public health messages and increase access to health care,” the letter stated. “However, an increase in state digital surveillance powers, like acquiring access to active phone location information, threatens privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association, in ways that could violate rights and degrade trust in public authorities — undermining the effectiveness of any public health response.”


You will support prevent the spread of COVID-19. Not each person has the alternative to live at residence, nevertheless in case could, you have to! Social distancing is the new common, and we’re here to help.