A moment you were pretty much the only person to where retreat from the world you can actually see that every generation has its moment this one is ours. Ringback trucking the pandemic thats an out for some governments want to use small focused tools to contain the spread of coronavirus critics are worried about the risk to prove a seat and security so how should we manage these consider this is inside still. Hello welcome to the program im been its been. To try and stay ahead of corona virus governments all over the world are looking to Smartphone Technology many are using or developing apps but track of movements these will let us know if youve been close to an infected person tracking and tracing software will become even more important as countries start to the lock down but critics are worried about potential breaches to our privacy and security well bring in our guests in a moment 1st this report from sarah clarke in hong kong when tricia cowen and her family returned to hong kong in april they were put in mandatory point tain for 14 days they were also required to wear this electronic respond the loaded authorities 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 paper made to be tracked and now one wants it spread further we all want to be over as quickly as possible so that that just involved may be a tracking Technology Developed in hong kong uses 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 of personal Information Technology we have a lot of options like phased work in the. Speed. Bit using this way that of them will be alerted when they use the net their home base here at the same time a poet had their whereabouts. 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 more the reasons why we are doing better. All 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 some of the apps look for peoples. Access. To call records even their contacts and in some cases they cannot and other 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 apps only work well if a majority of people use them one u. K. Trials starting next week need at least 80 percent participation to be effect. Lets introduce our panel in london we have michael vale a codeveloper of the previously preserving covert 1000 tracking system called deep e 3 t. And fellow at the University College of london in ns good 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 korean singles 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 internet to be able to work in other contexts michael these ups 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 we google apple 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 seemed 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 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 in an up 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 were looking for these kinds of Silver Bullets and can a sap help us to get out of the Current Crisis the 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 and d. Centralize apps work and the difference between them because youre looking at this decentralized version of the yes certainly so affectively the task is to say that anyone who has been close for maybe 1015 minutes to somebody relate a lot is in fact it should have an app notify them 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. And this is not anonymous state for a troll 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 to mean that all of the matching happens on peoples phones and never in a crowd so actually a Government Service 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 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 decider 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 on either 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. Device 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 and even then even if we do take measures in place that doesnt mean that theyll say that michael youre slightly nervous nervous about what to know and were 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 expecting alerts they could really change their behavior so you know its definitely not true that these technologies arent technology the power but weve designed prissie 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 all 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 part 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 this is unusual 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 to 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 sort of 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 consequence 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 the still has to be a question of how do we limit the power of 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 that out of the homeless for example shelter and people prisoners people integrations elders really 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 3 dimensions of privacy concerns anyway just from having 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 a 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 india theyve got to download this up 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 this 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 simulation 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 and 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 grossi 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 checks that 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 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. To try. Between. Giving up youll youll who 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 populations 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 who have the capability those who are also putting themselves and others at the highest risk and ignoring social distancing. And hand hygiene measures noan 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 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 putting 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 blue tooth sensitivity. Why call that said isnt it i mean this is a this turns it doesnt t