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France provides a case study of the battle between privacy and coronavirus tracing applications
France has become a lightning rod for technical and ethical debates surrounding attempts to balance public health and mass surveillance with COVID-19 tracing applications.
The French Government has embraced a framework for its StopCovid app, which would centralize the data collection of citizens. Privacy advocates blasted the strategy and accused French politicians who were otherwise concerned with privacy of being hypocrites. StopCovid also triggered a confrontation with Apple, which until now has refused to allow such an approach on its devices.
The government will not back down, maintaining that a centralized strategy will preserve privacy by anonymizing data while offering greater overall protection and insight into the spread of the virus. More importantly, the French government maintains that decisions need to be made by elected officials rather than private firms on the public use of this data.
With data seen as a critical tool to combat the pandemic, France's feverish arguments serve as a microcosm of the global debate on how to strike a balance between public health and privacy.
All parties agree that confidence building around these apps is essential to achieving high enough participation rates to be effective. As far as public buy-in and technical design is concerned, these apps will serve as a test run for governments seeking to navigate the tradeoffs necessary to combat not only coronavirus but also future pandemics.
"As with any technology, there is no zero risk," wrote French digital minister Cédric O in defending his government's approach to the development of an app. "No solution is foolproof, but of form has its own flaws ... StopCovid is not an application called 'peacetime.' Such a project would not exist without the COVID-19 "situation.
The government in France has chosen to adopt the unified system established by the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) community. This initiative, initially led by German researchers, eventually led to the development of a tracing system called ROBERT (ROBust Proximity Tracing Protocol and Privacy-PresERving).
Based on the ROBERT system, France's StopCovid app is feedback from a consortium of institutes , universities, and businesses. Which include the public health agency of France, Inria, ANSSI, Capgemini, Dassault Systèmes, Inserm, Lunabee Design, White, Withings, and. A version of the StopCovid app is scheduled to be ready for discussion and approval by the National Assembly of France in late May. Assuming it's approved and testing is successful, it can start rolling out early June.
The French model has received a preliminary thumbs up from the independent data protection agency Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL), which felt that it offered appropriate data protection measures to follow the requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR). The National Digital Council Advisory Board also provided preliminary support, but said it could not give a full opinion until it could assess the actual app.
It is cited by the French Government as one of the reasons to oppose the decentralized solution. The National Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI), its own security agency, labeled the "decentralized" model riskier because the encrypted identifiers would circulate on people's phones.
One of the main logjams remains tension between Apple and the French government, with the French group rushing to complete work on the app this month. Although the UK has followed a similar COVID-19 tracking device approach to France's, Germany has reversed course and opted for a decentralized version.
Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange, whose company is helping to build France's app, has expressed some hope that the French StopCovid technology group will reach an agreement with Apple. "Nearly every single day there are meetings. It's not a done deal yet ... but we're having a dynamic discussion with Apple, which isn't bad, "Richard told Reuters.
But the French Government has continued to express frustration. "Apple should have been helping us make the iPhone app work even better. We didn't want to, "France's O told BFM Business TV May 5. He also issued a stern reminder that the dispute with Apple underscores the "OS market oligopolistic nature," which places nations at the mercy of big business.
"Health policy is, from the French Government's point of view, a constitutional prerogative that is the state 's duty," O wrote. "It is up to the public authorities to make the decisions they find best to protect French men and women, with their virtues and their faults.
The French Government does not reject the API proposed by these two companies in the State, since they are American companies. ... Refuses to do so because it restricts the technical choice in its current format: Only a 'decentralized' solution can work perfectly on iOS-equipped phones."
France, he added, must be able to safeguard its sovereignty and "not be constrained as innovative and efficient as it is by the choices of a big firm."
Lost in these technological and political debates is the fact that nobody knows if any of these applications will be really successful. That's partly because the technology is unproven and it's unclear if enough people will download it.
In general, epidemiologists have reported that 60 percent of the population will use the devices to provide an effective monitoring system. Even then, Larus from Switzerland said the apps need to be linked to a country 's wider health-care system to have an impact. Individuals need to know what concrete steps to do if a notice is issued, such as who to contact for more details or to schedule a testing appointment. Similarly, doctors, hospitals, call centers for StopCovid apps, and testing facilities must be prepared to follow set policies if someone who has received an exposure notification contacts them.
Policymakers must determine whether to guide these people to get immediate tests or advise them to watch the symptoms.
"These issues involve large groups of people, and need political decisions," said Larus. "These are far more challenging decisions, and they are very national and country specific. There won't be the back end of a single app that you can take from one country and then plop it down in another.
Still, Larus said, he 's happy to see that the issues surrounding the app are being taken so seriously in France and across Europe, even though they can be quite technical. Making the right tradeoffs between privacy, protection, design and policy will be crucial to minimizing the damage from the current pandemic to this generation of contact tracing apps.
But the decisions now taken will likely also form the basis for potential touch tracing devices. If the coming COVID-19 apps are widely accepted and show their worth, when the next pandemic occurs, many difficult and time-consuming policy and technological debates will be avoided.
Image Credit: Reuters
