People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health

by Susan Landau

Overview

An introduction to the technology of contact tracing and its usefulness for public health, considering questions of efficacy, equity, and privacy.

How do you stop a pandemic before a vaccine arrives? Contact tracing is key, the first step in a process that has proven effective: trace, test, and isolate. Smartphones can collect some of the information required by contact tracers—not just where you've been but also who's been near you. Can we repurpose the tracking technology that we carry with us—devices with GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and social media connectivity—to serve public health in a pandemic? In People Count, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau looks at some of the apps developed for contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that issues of effectiveness and equity intersect.

Landau explains the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of a range of technological interventions, including dongles in Singapore that collect proximity information; India's biometric national identity system; Harvard University's experiment, TraceFi; and China's surveillance network. Other nations rejected China-style surveillance in favor of systems based on Bluetooth, GPS, and cell towers, but Landau explains the limitations of these technologies. She also reports that many current apps appear to be premised on a model of middle-class income and a job that can be done remotely. How can they be effective when low-income communities and front-line workers are the ones who are hit hardest by the virus? COVID-19 will not be our last pandemic; we need to get this essential method of infection control right.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262045711
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy at The Fletcher School and at the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, at Tufts University. She is the coauthor of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) and the author of Surveillance or Security? (MIT Press) and Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Stopping a Pandemic
2. Adding Technology to Contact Tracing
3. Protecting Privacy While Tracing Disease
4. Can Contact-Tracing Apps be Effective Tools of Public Health?
5. Looking to the Long Term
Acknowledgements
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Landau deftly tells the intriguing tale of a novel coronavirus, digital technology, and human ingenuity. People Count  demystifies disease diffusion, ties testing to tracking, and assesses the apps for that.”
—William W. Darrow, Professor of Public Health, Florida International University; former Chief, Behavioral and Prevention Research Branch, Division of STD/HIV Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
 
“People Count is a remarkable, solution-based contribution to the privacy and data challenges at the intersection of technology and public health. It is also a must-read [JMF1] for a world where technology will be essential to stop the next pandemic.”
—Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of Security and Global Health Project, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

Editorial Reviews

"In a pandemic, good science is what we need. Now, a year and a half later, in People Count: Contact Tracing Apps and Public Health, Tufts University professor Susan Landau has set out to make a sober assessment."
—ZDNET

"Contact-tracing apps can be a useful tool for public health, but they have considerable false positive and false negative rates."
—Big Think

From the Publisher