Tracking the pandemic thats an option for some governments want to use small phones as tools to contain the spread of corona virus critics are worried about the risk to prove a seat and security so how should we manage these concerns this is inside still. Hello welcome to the program im been its to try and stay ahead of coronavirus governments all over the world looking to Smartphone Technology many are using all developing apps but track movements these will let us know if weve been close to an infected person tracking and tracing software will become even more important as countries start to lock down but critics are worried about potential breaches to all privacy and security will bring in our guests in a moment 1st this report from sara clock in hong kong. When tricia cowen and her family returned to hong kong in april they were put in mandatory quarantine for 14 days they were also required to wear this electronic respect and the loaded authority if they breached a quarantine regulations and left their apartment. I didnt think about it i just think that this had to be done i mean its people need to be tracked and now one wants it spread further we all want to be over as quickly as possible so that that just involvement. You know tracking Technology Developed in hong kong is a y. Find there put to detect if the user changes location but the company says the only data shared with the government is movement not personal Information Technology we have a lot of options like phased work in the. Speech nation but using this way that alone will be alert when they use the net their home but at the same time it would have their way of. Mobile apps and digital surveillance are being used by many governments in asia to track the spread of the corona virus china uses a color based q. R. Code to monitor peoples movements and health in south korea overseas travelers who dont download a Government App are refused entry i think this is a key part of the term Infection Control in asia especially using this technology to track down these people who are putting them into quarantine so it is probably one of the most and one reasons why we are doing better. On the possible world but critics say some government mandated apps can also access a users personal data and be used as a surveillance tool its a real fear that this data will end up in the hands of governments so the apps look for people to. Access. The call records even their contacts and in some cases they cannot and all the information together can you know. Peoples lives 2 of the worlds biggest tech giants at google and apple plan to embed new features in their devices using context tracing technology but say the tool will be removed once the pandemic ends the critics say it could lead to ongoing some violence with governments using the data the other persons. Technology may be playing a Critical Role in containing the pandemic but human Rights Groups warn it might also normalize surveillance in the future once this outbreak is under control. Sarah clarke aljazeera hong kong Coronavirus Tracking ups keep a record of where youve been most will use Bluetooth Technology they work well when people a close to each other smartphones talk to nearby devices theyll quickly alert a user if he or she is near a confirmed or suspected case this can help to dish and tracing which involves manually tracking down the contacts of infected people. Around 30 tracking systems are being developed around the world but researches say the opposite only work well if a majority of people use them one u. K. Trial starting next week needs at least 80 percent participation to be effect. Lets introduce our panel in london we have michael vale a codeveloper of the previously preserving coded 1000 tracking system called this d p 3 t. And fellow at the University College of london in any school day in the netherlands we have no longer an assistant professor at the university of 20 and a technology ethicist and in brighton also in the u. K. Joshua moon or search fellow at the university of sussex welcome to you all joshua ill start with you 1st if i may any evidence that these apps work im thinking of the ones theyve been trying using already in south korea and singapore for example well to some extent there is some evidence that these apps are useful in any Contact Tracing i think south korea and singapore are good examples for how these apps could work but the important fact of both south korea and singapore as examples is that they have both been supported by very intensive human Contact Tracing. Programs and so there is little evidence that they work on their own and would require quite extensive all from human Contact Trace in to be able to work in other contexts michael these up so much use on their own or does it does it need a whole package of measures oh so many as a whole package of measures firstly. In our particular protocols which are other protocols and way to grapple a proposal for the father son based we assume that you have to test in. Thats the 1st thing you cant notify someone if they are risking potentially let them use that notification to go into quarantine without really knowing that there was a real danger of them being exposed and secondly its really important to say these are no Silver Bullets these are not a replacement for manual Contact Tracing the real benefit of them is that you might be able to catch someone who you didnt see that was behind you want to bust or that you werent really aware you were spending a lot of time with and couldnt remember or didnt know to identity oh man because the virus spreads really fast this is a complementary measure and on its own will not be helpful no and all same sounds fairly harmless doesnt it a 1st look at apps that will help us either stop getting coronavirus or stop it being spread yeah i think the the issue is not just about will it work well what is working me so for example if weve become to rely too heavily on apps even if as others have said this isnt a Silver Bullet it still leaves us to to become perhaps complacent on the idea that well develop better and better apps so we have better and better Technological Solutions meaning that rather than take the sort of social steps necessary to really prevent krone virus like crises happening in the future instead we just rely on Technology Companies to do that for us i mean joshua we are looking for a Silver Bullet really arent we whether it whether its in a vaccine whether its and or not we all want something help that will help us get back to normal is this going to be the quickest way for us to get back to some sort of normal living. I think to look for a Silver Bullet is understandable in a situation like this youre looking to get out of a crisis as fast as possible but i think no ones fully correct that we have some level of. Possible complacency that we have to watch out for when looking for these kinds of Silver Bullets and can a sap help us to get out of the Current Crisis they cant lock down faster possibly but as michael has a resurgent as nolens alluded to this has to be combined with. Traditional Contact Tracing measures patient isolation increased testing these kinds of things before we can. Even consider it to be successful and useful in helping is going to. Michael without going to deep into technology to would want to put people off with going into a deeply look into technology explain how centralized in d centralize apps work and the difference between them because youre looking at this decentralized version of the yes certainly so effectively the task is to say that anyone who has been close for maybe 1015 minutes to somebody related learned in fact it should have an app notify them that that was the case and maybe that phone number can be passed to the Health Authorities or maybe they can call the help authorities so thats the task the question is how do you do that and there are 2 main ways a very simple way to do this but not one that is very purposely preserving its core a centralized system where effectively a server which is your computer run by a government run Health Authority gets access to a network or who saw who and then analyze that network and sends notifications to people who are at risk the problem with that is that social network data is incredibly sensitive can be repurposed in ways that are already under fire and this is not anonymous states rotolo because by to by definition and by design the Health Authority has to be ever take every little node in that network and say im going to work out who that is and contact them so its not an anonymous system in our system a decentralized system what happens is your personal data never leaves your device. Effectively we use cryptography too to mean that all of the matching happens on peoples phones and never in a crowd so actually a Government Survey does not learn anything that it can use we have the same goal we meet the same goals but in a way which doesnt create a big centralized source of power that can be can be misused so this is really binds governments and Health Authorities to doing what they say to say ok we only want to build a Contact Tracing system and so we say ok well if you use our technology you only can do in the context ranking system and you cant let the decide to use it to analyze issues for immigration purposes for example you know you have time so no in keeping that decentralized system in an app that sounds like a sensible privacy protecting way of Going Forward doesnt it yeah except there are 2 issues that you can take for example on the one hand this helps to reinforce the idea that privacy should be thought of as something to be traded off for example for security. Instead of seen as something that we need intrinsically as human beings that cannot be traded off on the other hand there is the issue that at some point you will have to d. Anonymize yourself in order to report say the hospital to get your own credit virus tested so even if it stays on the phone you yourself will have to d. N. R. Vies which again can lead to issues where that can itself be traced back once they start to figure out well how did you come into contact with this person who was it so again even then even if we do take measures in place that doesnt mean that theyll say that michael youre slightly nervous nervous about what nolan was saying that what we what was your point one point is that in the system weve built there is no personal data thats collected in the cloud and so if we think of christie more broadly i totally agree this is all of these technologies not surveillance technologies because they try and change the way behave people interact because people be expected. They could really change their behavior so you know its definitely not true that these technologies arent so much the power but weve designed privacy into it much more than a centralized system and the last point again totally correct you would be alerted so therefore you could going to text or take further action but that is firstly the same with manual Contact Tracing and secondly there is no way for the Health Authority to actually learn who infected you in a situation because thats not necessary data so weve removed that ability and thats because there is no way to learn this social network of society so the Health Authority would get if they set it up this way is a constant list of call these people or potentially as we personally suggest a notification that says could you call us and they dont get their social network which is the really pretty invasive we see but doesnt mean the technologies are technologies of power and that what we should be considering in a Democratic Society very carefully joshua when the overriding concern seems to be to stop people getting coronavirus to stop the virus spreading how prepared should we be to compromise our privacy and panic comes down to a question of collective benefit versus individual risk theres always going to be a risk with impersonal human Contact Tracing that. The state will the government will be aware of who you are who infected you and who you have gone on to in fact the key question is so what extent we willing to accept that individual risk for a collective benefit of stop coronavirus i think we have to be quite wary of what we do allow particularly because as weve seen in. Places like west africa the polar crisis as we saw with World Health Organization actions throughout the past 15 to 20 years if you allow something to happen in a crisis whether or not that gets then revoked to whether or not those risks are reduced after the crisis is not necessarily a given and so i think while the Technology May or may not be overly necessary as part of a Contact Tracing for a Large Population there still has to be a question of how do we limit the power that these sets of data actually have over the populations and so this has to be done with great care and compassion no and where we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place dont we were going to have to give up some privacy to try and get on top of this well theres also the issue of course that this is relying. On technology so there are all the large swathes of the population left out of the homeless for example shelter and people presenting these people in a gracious elders we do really have to take seriously the idea that this is going to only talk about a very select member select sliver of the population for whom because they already have smartphones already have pretty dimensions of privacy concerns anyway just to have it facebook other. I agree that there will be plenty of people willing to trade privacy but there is still. Concern about all the people who are left out of michael you mentioned and weve mentioned how they are born its own is not going to be the panacea to this but how useful is it i mean how many people 1st of all need to be using it do we have do we should we need mandating downloading of the app like india house just telling everyone in india theyve got to download this out so in a few parts of that so firstly we dont exactly know how many people need to use it it will be geographically distributed we find any evidence around the use of this that really we only have models we have never as you well know deployed as that are going on a population level scale for this kind of technology so we are really doing this as an experiment to work out if it could be used while having some stimulation evidence but the simulation evidence indicates about 60 percent of people who own who are in a population in a maybe geographic region would need to use this application for it to have a serious effect that the simulations indicated could thats not that is completely you know im on the point is who are those 60 percent and thats a really important question in terms of voluntary or mandatory the reason we are designing proceed preserving application which is currently i mean our design is that it does i have a choice from germany austria switzerland or stone you know that yeah im more countries that have yet to declare. The reason we do this is because we strongly believe it should be voluntary i strongly believe that weve also written a draft law for the u. K. That indicates that and the only way you can do that is that people truly have the trust of them of especially privacy and Security Experts say this is an ok thing to use and you dont have that trust your developing a core system you might have to make it mandatory and then you get the worst of both worlds but just sure if it is only voluntary its not going to be as effective as it could be is it but thats not necessarily a trade off that we need to make willingly and. The trade. Between. Giving up youll youll move some of you will privacy for something that many. May or may not actually help him Contact Tracing is is still something that is an individual records concern should be down to individual calls to make choice not to the state will the collective as a whole there are spaces population that wont have access to a smart who wont have access to the technology but on top of this you also have the question of if downloading misses voluntary then are those who are the least likely to voluntarily download this who have the capability those who are also putting themselves and others at the highest risk and ignoring social distancing. And hand hygiene measures no one is our only worry about all of this previously or is there society as well ready people are becoming more suspicious of each other in a way when theyre worried about who hasnt hasnt got coronavirus will ease up access abate those d issues yeah i think there is certainly something about this idea of track and trace that has theres been a nice way of letting you know stigmatize and be suspicious so there is certainly this concern. You know being treated like you are just a disease better not a human being anymore youre just you know a dot on a plane you know we have to control and i think this is again part of the problem of relying on technologies is that they turn political issues into engineering issues so rather than be concerned with issues like solidarity they become issues of things like bluetooth sensitivity. Michael that said isnt it i mean this is a this turns it doesnt turn as into spies but it turns people into being suspicious of other people when they have these. Doesnt it to some degree yes the sort of no manual Contact Tracing out say and so does this whole situation where we find ourselves in general i think to some degree we cant avoid that but we also have to face up to the fact that interventions such as apps may make that particularly worse these open up important questions how do we just mantle this kind of system once its created one of the purposes that we built this system is purpose limitation by design and the idea of being is that you stop function create you prevent certain kinds of mission being easily to sort of take it so that for example the state doesnt have a database they can analyze in great detail its really a known quantity and no. Way of triggering risk or not triggering risk and it there i completely agree with everybody else on apparel that these are technologies are power and we must be very very careful because they will only help in some ways if they do help at all and they may only help some people our motivation for designing this system was do no harm we saw this huge train of Political Energy towards making x. At all and said look this is happening it seems to be happening what we can do is at least ensure it happens in at and out very very completely privacy preserving way and that doesnt solve all the societal problems so definitely not but it is one piece of the puzzle a joshua to use michaels word how we are will we ever be able to dismantle these apps once our all our phones are going to be hard to get rid of are they that the government could make us carry out a no immunity certificates its going to be very hard to get rid of the business to some extent yes i think. Michael but quite well this idea of function creep and that iran regardless of whether or not its built into the technology there are still individuals who are using the technology and using the data that it produces and so the question still remains. Ones of whether or not after the crisis is over is that going to be some sort of function creep and when the technology is used for a different purpose. Weve seen this happen already in other areas and so it is just a question of and sure not just the technology but in the legislation and the processes within which the technology is used that everything is limited as much as possible and i think a lot of that is not necessarily down to the technology but how again how we use it as a package of political legislative and social responses to know and how do we make sure that once these apps of serve their useful function governments will get rid of them you know i think this is a problem that we cant be sure i mean this is part of the issue those are being discussed 70 years ago a shock l. O. L. This idea that technology and democracy dont really mix insofar as citizens dont understand the technology and they cant actually invoke their rights as citizens to actually make the decisions in ethics this is typically discussed in terms of informed consent and again the issue is how informed are we really and part of my concern about how we talk about privacy is were treating it as if everyone has the same sense of what privacy mean without realizing that if we do which apps and devices reshape. What we mean by privacy in the same went to facebook for example so we dont talk about whether its violated privacy talk about how its completely redefined and again these apps will do something similar so the issue isnt how these apps a let us get back to normal but how theyll give us a whole new sense of normality with invasiveness based right in a michael just quickly when youre developing these apps is there a risk that you look at that people might become complacent of taking care of other issues if they come to rely on an app too much maybe not washing their hands as much not Wearing Masks that sort of thing yeah thats certainly a risk here we really dont see that so much as a risk. We have developed as can do much with this is a risk for for public out of our cheese to make sure about and we are obviously aware and its been a big debate for any of the the resident in following us about the meticulous types of apps and how this has been working geologically for example the moment on the the irish Northern Irish border during compatible systems appear to be a matching. And these are really a political debates and people can accuse us and others of taking too much oxygen but really we also think these the devil is in the details and as as the other panelists are not just set its hard for individuals to understand the Technical Details but someone has to have enough to pay because these details are political so we have been having a political debate there has been taking out oxygen and we think of things that oxygen as well but its the distribution of that is not really within our power to control and i would fully support a much greater tonight and thats why we published coronavirus safeguards there are an academic colleagues in the u. K. Which deals with many of the more wider repercussions of that issue in law gentlemen weve got to leave it there for the moment with thank you very much for helping our understanding of how these apps might work thanks to all of our guests to michael vale to no end and to joshua moon and thank you to a watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website aljazeera dot com and for further debate go to our Facebook Page at facebook dot com forward slash a. J. Inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter we are at a. J. And sad story for me Bernard Smith and the entire team here in doha by phone and. 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