Living with COVID Tracker Ireland
COVID Tracker Ireland, Jeremiah Russell
Last week, after reviewing the DPIA and other documentation provided by the HSE, I installed the COVID Tracker Ireland app. On the weekend, I was out for dinner with my wife at the Red Torch Ginger in Maynooth. It was our first night out since the COVID lockdown started in March. This article describes how the COVID Tracker App works to aid contact tracing.
While I enjoyed a lovely meal with my wife, the COVID tracker app exchanged identities with any other devices within a two-metre range. It generates a new identifier approximately every fifteen minutes without reference to any personal data . Over two hours, it will have advertised eight or more different ids. All the data collected remains secured on the phones.
COVID Tracker Ireland App
Suppose that on Monday, the owner of one of those phones is made aware that they have been in contact with someone who is COVID positive. They contact the health services and get a COVID test. The result is positive.
The contact tracing team will ask if they are using the app and will need their phone number to send a code to unlock the feature to distribute their diagnosis keys to the central server.
My phone (an android phone) downloads the diagnosis keys every two hours and will use these keys to find the ids from the phone recorded during my meal. I get an alert that I have been in contact with a COVID-19 positive person.
I can then choose what to do with this information. I don’t know who the contact is, or when, or where we were in close contact. It might be the meal out, or the trip to the shops on Sunday or another occasion since I installed the application.
The app deletes identifiers that are older than 14 days. The notification will remain active until the related id has expired, or the user cancels it[1].
There are other features in the application that collect personal data. All these services are optional[2]. There may be some doubts about how effective the service can be in detecting the proximity of two devices, particularly in crowded environments with dense materials such as buses and trains. Perhaps too many false positives would put a strain on the testing services. In the end effectiveness in production can only be determined in production. A critical success factor for any networking app is adoption: the more people who use the app, the more likely it is to be successful.
As a user, you can decide what information you want to provide. The core service protects your privacy by generating anonymous keys and ids and processing them only on your phone.
For me, on balance, the application is a valuable contribution to help keep COVID-19 under control as we re-open businesses. But, as with all data protection risks (especially with novel technologies), this decision will be kept under regular review.