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“The limitations of those kind of apps are extensive,” said Mike Reid, an assistant professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, who’s leading the effort to train contact tracers in the state. “I don’t think they have an important role to play for most of the population.”
The contact tracers, he said, will be using software made by Salesforce and Accenture to help reach patients by phone and are trained on how to protect sensitive patient information.
“We go to pains to minimize the amount of data we take from people and we ask consent from people we’re talking to on the phone. We go to considerable lengths to ensure there are strong technical controls to ensure the anonymization of our platforms,” he said. “Can you say the same thing about these big tech companies? I’m not sure.”
Some security researchers have also questioned whether the companies’ restrictions on public health officials and technical methods have posed their own challenges.
With the Apple and Google approach, “we’ve overcompensated for privacy and still created other risks and not solved the problem,” said Ashkan Soltani, the former chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. “I’d personally be more comfortable if it were a health agency that I trusted and there were legal protections in place over the use of the data and I knew it was operated by a dedicated security team.”
Countries such as Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have said they will use the Apple-Google system, though other countries, including Norway and the U.K., are building and testing more centralized apps they hope will work around the companies’ restrictions. France’s digital minister, Cédric O, said in a TV interview last week that it was deeply regrettable how Apple had failed to help the country’s efforts during the crisis, and that officials would remember the slight.
But some public health experts believe the push toward unproven virus-tracing apps has wasted time and missed the point. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now working with the health organization Vital Strategies, said the proximity-tracing system as proposed by Apple and Google has “been largely a distraction.”
“There are very serious questions about its feasibility and its ability to be done with adequate respect for privacy, and it has muddied the water for what actually needs to happen,” Frieden said in an interview Wednesday. “This was an approach that was done with not much understanding and a lot of overpromising.”
His group is now working with New York state officials to build three smartphone apps tackling more basic problems: assisting quarantined people with remote health-care visits and food deliveries, and helping contact tracers do their jobs. He said developers grappling with the Apple-Google system would have a greater impact focusing on simpler struggles for local health departments as opposed to pursuing “magical thinking.”
The proximity-tracing systems are “a bright shiny object,” he said, “but right now they’re doing nothing to stop the pandemic.

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