Google, Apple and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week made headlines with announcements of contact tracing mobile apps in the wings. Their purpose is to identify contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19 so appropriate actions can be taken to stem its spread.
However, a Cambridge University professor threw some cold water on those apps in a post published Sunday.
The apps proposed by Google, Apple and MIT all have voluntary aspects to them. That may address the privacy concerns such apps are raising, but it creates other problems, argued Ross John Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
"If the app's voluntary, nobody has an incentive to use it, except tinkerers and people who religiously comply with whatever the government asks," he wrote.
"If uptake remains at 10-15 percent, as in Singapore, it won't be much use and we'll need to hire more contact tracers instead," Anderson continued.
"All that said, I suspect the tracing apps are really just do-something-itis. Most countries now seem past the point where contact tracing is a high priority; even Singapore has had to go into lockdown," he pointed out.
"If it becomes a priority during the second wave, we will need a lot more contact tracers: Last week, 999 calls in Cambridge had a 40-minute wait and it took ambulances six hours to arrive. We cannot field an app that will cause more worried well people to phone 999," Anderson argued.
He called for more resources going into expanding testing, making ventilators, retraining everyone with a clinical background from vet nurses to physiotherapists to use them, and building field hospitals.
"We must call out bullshit when we see it, and must not give policymakers the false hope that techno-magic might let them avoid the hard decisions," Anderson added.

Pandemic Makes Strange Bedfellows

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week tweeted that the companies were working on a mobile phone application for contact tracing.