The world's health departments didn't get very far into developing phone-based coronavirus tracing apps before they realised they had an Apple problem.
The apps – such as the COVIDSafe tracing app that the Australian government views as an essential part of its back-to-work plans – rely on Bluetooth signals being sent and received in the background, as ordinary people go about their daily lives.
They work like this: should two strangers, Alice and Bob, happen to ride the same train together into work one morning, and should Bob later test positive for COVID-19, then the small tokens of data that Alice's and Bob's phones exchanged in the background can be used to help Alice find out that she might have been exposed to the virus, too.
But Apple's iPhone has a problem with exchanging data in the background. In order to preserve the battery life, the iPhone can arbitrarily put apps to sleep, interfering with the COVID tracing apps ability to exchange data. (Google's Android phones can also put apps to sleep, but Android provides a mechanism, involving a permanent message appearing in the phone's notification panel, that all-but-prevents an app from sleeping.)
It was enough of a problem that, in April, in a rare moment of co-operation, Apple and Google announced they were working together on sorting out their Bluetooth differences, and on a Bluetooth token exchange system that could be used by countries that didn't already have their own contact tracing systems.
Late last month, Apple and Google both released their versions of that software and, to the horror of health departments around the world, Apple had tightly coupled the two solutions – the Bluetooth fix, and the proposed contact tracing system – so governments couldn't take advantage of the former without also adopting the latter.
The problem is, the latter embodies a vision of healthcare, and a vision of the role of government (or, to be precise, a vision of the world in which government plays a diminished role) that may well wash in Apple's home country, the USA, but that certainly doesn't wash everywhere.
A battle to decouple the two elements – to decouple, in effect, the ideology from the technology – is now being fought between Apple and health departments around the world, and it brings into stark relief the dogma that Big Tech is slowly but surely foisting upon the world.
To put it mildly, it's not a dogma that is to everybody's taste. It's the same dogma that many restaurants are fighting against, as they try to resist the Uber Eats vision of the world in which everyone stays locked behind their front door, opening it only to accept a delivery from an underpaid "partner" .
It involves a de-personalised, de-centralised view of civic life that should be adopted only with caution and thorough debate, if at all.
In the case of Apple, it involves the question of who should take responsibility for notifying someone that they may have been in contact with someone who has come down with COVID-19: Big Tech, or Big State?
Apple's view (and also Google's, though Google has been polite enough not to insist on it) is that Big Tech is best-placed to manage that potentially life-changing moment in someone's day.
In the Big Tech version of contact tracing, Alice's phone would periodically ping a server somewhere, looking for any data tokens that have been associated with a COVID-19 sufferer. The moment Alice's phone notices that the tokens it collected from Bob's phone are also on the list of toxic tokens it just downloaded, it will notify her and tell her to contact health authorities.
Lack of human expertise
The solution has the advantage of speed, something which is of the essence when it comes to managing potential outbreaks of the unusually fast-spreading virus.
But it lacks the advantage of human nuance, and human empathy, at a moment which, for many people, can have profound mental health implications if it's mishandled.
Not to mention, it entirely leaves it up to the individual, Alice, to determine what she wants to do with the information. Maybe she wants to self-isolate and get tested? Or maybe she wants to get on a train and ride the city loop, just to get revenge on the city that infected her?
(Or, more accurately, may have infected her. That's another thing the Apple/Google version of the app lacks: the human expertise, garnered only from decades of experience in epidemiology, to know when an exchanged Bluetooth packet is a decent indication of an exchanged bodily fluid, and when it's just noise. Maybe Alice only rode one stop, and was wearing a mask and rubber gloves? The app doesn't know.)
In the dogma of Big Tech, the individual is still sovereign, even during a pandemic when the state might argue it has a valid interest.
Needless to say, the state-run health departments tasked with containing the pandemic aren't all racing to adopt Apple's software. Many are forgoing Apple's Bluetooth fix in order to stick with contact tracing solutions that use the information exchanged over Bluetooth to inform professional, human contact tracers who, amongst other things, have been trained in art of giving people worrisome news.
And the Australian Department of Health, which has been one of the most successful outfits in the world at managing the COVID-19 pandemic, is especially not racing to adopt a technology and a small-state ideology cooked up in country that has proved singularly inept at pandemic management.
Just the insult of it would be bad enough.
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- Sarah L. Kaufman