Why COVID-19 Tracking Apps Aren’t Working

COVID-19 tracking apps warn users when they've spent more than a few moments in the presence of an infected person. When you receive this warning, you yourself can get tested, and then anybody who came into contact with you can also be warned.

The idea of using technology to combat the pandemic spread fast. After all, almost everybody carries a smartphone with them whenever they leave the house. Back at the beginning of the pandemic, the main concern was privacy—what else might our governments do with all that data once they had gathered it? But the real problem, it turns out, is that COVID-19 tracking apps just aren’t that useful.

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Privacy Vs. Efficacy

There are two kinds of coronavirus tracking app. One kind tracks your location and uses your phone’s Bluetooth capabilities to determine your proximity to other phone users. This data is sent to a central repository. From there, comparisons are made, and users can be warned about potential infection. The privacy problems here are obvious. What government wouldn't be tempted by such a trove of information? Hidden within that data are potential clandestine liaisons, crimes in progress, and more.

“The population must be able to have confidence that its data is treated as confidentially as that in doctors’ [offices] and hospitals,” Howard Oakley, a software developer and writer who has studied contact-tracing apps, told Lifewire via email. “If they don't, then they assume that their government is up to something.”

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Privacy First

The second kind of contact-tracing app values privacy. No location or other personal data leaves your phone. Instead, phones exchange anonymous blips—aka keys—of data between themselves whenever they come close. Phones generate new keys regularly, so it’s impossible to track anyone’s movement over time.

If a user becomes infected, they self-report this to the app, then have the option to upload their own list of keys for the last 14 days. This is added to a master list and regularly broadcasted to all users. Your own phone checks to see if it has ever encountered one of the keys on this master list, and if so, it notifies you.

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This second method is the one used by Google and Apple for their joint Exposure Notifications System (ENS). It protects privacy while also letting a government quickly allow apps to access it. In theory, it’s a fantastic method. But in practice, it isn’t working.

There are two major problems with COVID-19 contact-tracing apps right now. One is that not enough people are using them. The other is that they’re locking away a ton of valuable data.

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Germany, a Successful Failure

“Tackling the problem of anonymous contacts is very important in modern infection prevention.”

Germany’s Corona-Warn app has been a relative success. As of June 28th, the app had been downloaded 16.4 million times, with a roughly equal split between iPhone and Android. That sounds good, but the population of Germany is 83 million, so only 20% of the population is using it.

Part of this is technical. The iPhone version only works on the iPhone 6s and newer, for example, and the iPhone app was only available to people with German App Store accounts at launch, so none of the foreigners living in Germany could use it.

“Tackling the problem of anonymous contacts is very important in modern infection prevention,” says Oakley. “But if adoption is poor, the whole thing just falls flat.”

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The result is that only 792 users have reported testing positive for the virus. Or rather, 792 verification numbers have been issued. When a person tests positive for the virus, they can get a “TeleTAN,” a code that confirms they actually got a positive result. This prevents users from spoofing the app with false results.

According to a report by the BBC, there is no way to tell whether these TeleTAN’s were actually entered into the app. There is also no way to tell if anyone acted on any warning they received, or if any false positives or negatives were generated. 

Usually, an app’s developers would use this kind of information to check whether the app was working properly, and to tweak the algorithms to improve it. But with the Apple/Google method, it’s not possible.