In: Operations Management
The world’s 3 billion-plus smartphones emit the kind of data
that health authorities covet during outbreaks. They show where
individuals are, where they’ve been and who they might have talked
to or even touched — potentially offering maps to find infected
people and clues to stopping new ones.
But gaining access to this data, even amid a global pandemic, is
made complex by the legal and ethical issues surrounding government
access to information that can reveal intimate details about
citizens’ lives. That includes clues to their social networks,
their sexual relationships, their political activity, their
religious convictions and their physical movements over previous
months and even years.
This is a central dilemma as officials in the United States and
other nations seek troves of data that might help fight the
devastating coronavirus outbreak but also could raise fears that
their government is spying on them or gaining access to information
that could be used against them later, after the health emergency
has waned.
Public-health experts argue that the location-tracking capabilities
as practiced in such countries as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore
proved remarkably effective at helping officials control the spread
of coronavirus — and that the U.S. needs all the help it can get
amid projections that millions of Americans may get infected and
hundreds of thousands may die.
“We are at war and we are fighting for our survival, for our lives,
our health, our economy,” said Chunhuei Chi, director of the Center
for Global Health at Oregon State University. “We are stretched
very thin in most states, so this kind of technology can help every
state to prioritize, given their limited resources, which
communities, which areas, need more aggressive tracking and
testing.”
Many privacy advocates see value in potentially giving public
health authorities access to information created by smartphone use.
That’s especially true if the data is voluntarily shared, as is
already happening in several nations, where apps give users the
option of uploading their location histories to health
authorities.
“There’s no reason to have to throw out our principles like privacy
and consent to do this,” said Peter Eckersley, an artificial
intelligence researcher who organized an open letter on ways the
tech industry could help combat the outbreak.
There is far more concern, however, about the program underway in
Israel, which is using location data the government collected for
fighting terrorism, to identify people potentially exposed to the
novel coronavirus and ordering them to immediately isolate
themselves “to protect your relatives and the public.” Hundreds of
such texts started being sent by health authorities there on
Wednesday. Late Thursday, the Israeli supreme court issued a
temporary injunction, allowing only those who test positive to be
tracked, and ruled that a parliamentary committee would have to
endorse the initiative by Tuesday or it must be shut down.
In the United States, the White House has been in negotiations with
major technology companies, including Google and Facebook, about
potentially using aggregated and anonymized location data created
by smartphone use, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, but
those efforts have been kept largely from the public Based on The
Post’s reporting, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter
Thursday seeking answers about potential partnerships between the
federal government and private companies.
“Although I agree that we must use technological innovations and
collaboration with the private sector to combat the coronavirus, we
cannot embrace action that represents a wholesale privacy invasion,
particularly when it involves highly sensitive and personal
location information,” Markey wrote to Michael Kratsios, the
government’s chief technology officer. “I urge you to balance
privacy with any data-driven solutions to the current public health
crisis.”
Telecommunications giants in Austria, Germany and Italy also said
this week that they would provide anonymized data on customers’
locations to government agencies hoping to analyze people’s
movements.
O2, a telecom giant in the U.K., said Thursday that it was one of a
group of mobile operators in the country asked by government
officials to share aggregate location data on mass movements. The
discussions are in an early stage, said a spokesman, who added that
the company has “the potential to build models that help to predict
broadly how the virus might move.”
Privacy experts repeatedly have shown that supposedly anonymous
data can still be used to identify individual people, based on
their known movements and other markers. Data that’s both anonymous
and aggregated is far more private but also less useful in
identifying people at particular risk for contracting coronavirus
and spreading it to others.
The U.S. government has broad authority to request personal data in
the case of a national emergency but does not have the legal
authority, except in criminal investigations, to insist that
companies turn it over, said Al Gidari, director of privacy at
Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
With appropriate safeguards, Gidari said the potential use of
location data to combat coronavirus is “a real opportunity to do
something positive with the technology and still protect people’s
privacy.”
But currently there are no legal controls on how the federal
government might use data once it has been collected, so location
information collected for a health emergency could later be
acquired by the FBI or the IRS.
Such complexities put companies in the uncomfortable position of
balancing public safety and their customers’ privacy in deciding
what data to share.
Many public-health experts say however that there are examples
overseas of how such technology blunted the fast-spreading
outbreak. In South Korea, the government directed tens of thousands
of quarantined people to install a “Self-Quarantine Safety
Protection” app that would monitor their phone’s location and alert
health authorities if they left home. People also could use the app
to report daily symptom check-ins and speak with the local
government official overseeing their case.
On the app's website, the country's Ministry of the Interior and
Safety said users would be protecting the “health and safety of
your neighbors through strict self-isolation and observing the
rules of life.” But because the app is voluntary, some critics have
suggested its value is limited; people who wanted to skip
quarantine could simply not turn it on.
Korean officials also routinely send text messages to people’s
phones with public-health tips and alerts on newly confirmed
infections in their neighborhood — in some cases, alongside details
of where the unnamed person had traveled before entering
quarantine.
But more so than the technology, the country’s vigorous
health-screening infrastructure — more than 300‚000 people have
been tested there in the last two months, compared to roughly
80,000 in the U.S. — has been credited by researchers with helping
the country slow the virus’ spread.
Singapore, too, has asked people to use a voluntary
location-tracking system based around QR codes — the square bar
codes with information readable by smartphones — installed in cabs,
offices and public spaces, which people have been instructed to
scan upon passing. Health officials there have said the digital
breadcrumb trail can help with infection “contact tracing,” but the
data is far from complete, likely limiting its widespread
use.
For an even more aggressive and seemingly effective example, some
public-health experts have pointed to Taiwan, an island nation of
24 million people that has recorded only 100 infections, though it
sits just 80 miles off the Chinese coast.
The country uses mandatory phone-location tracking to enforce
quarantines, sending texts to people who stray beyond their
lockdown range, directing them to call the police immediately or
face a $33,000 fine. People who don’t have a GPS-enabled phone are
issued a governmentprovided phone for the full length of the
quarantine.
Devastated by a SARS outbreak in 2003, the country has spent years
investing and preparing for viral outbreaks and, in some cases,
disinformation campaigns from neighboring China. It also has
established a government agency, the Central Epidemic Command
Center, with special crisis-era powers to gather data and track
people's movements.
When the outbreak spread, the government combined citizens’ health
records — from its universal heath-care system — with customs and
immigration records, helping piece together the travel histories of
people suspected of infection. Those histories were made instantly
available to medical providers, who tested for covid-19 and ordered
quarantines for both confirmed cases and those who had traveled
recently from widely infected countries.
For everyone else, the government offers an app that provides daily
updates on reported cases, travel restrictions and details on
community spread. Officials also make reams of real-time data
publicly available, including online maps of where people can buy
surgical masks.
The level of data gathering and surveillance is deeply intimate.
But Chi, the Center for Global Health director, said it has also
given Taiwanese people peace of mind about the unprecedented spread
of a virus they can’t see.
“When the public doesn’t get adequate information, you give room
for fake information to spread, and also panic,” Chi said. “When
you do something like Taiwan did, you feel safe: You don’t have to
worry about who’s infected. That’s not the case in the U.S.”
In the United States, wireless carriers such as AT&T and
Verizon have extensive records on their customer’s movements based
on what cellular towers their smartphones use to connect to broader
networks. AT&T said it has not had talks with any government
agencies about sharing this data for purposes of combating
coronavirus. Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.
The information collected by some technology companies is
significantly more precise, by tracking locations through GPS and
the proximity of individual users to wireless data sources. Google,
which operates navigation apps Google Maps and Waze and also
produces the Android mobile operating system, the world’s most
popular, has a particularly extensive trove of data.
Google said on Tuesday that it had not yet shared any data with the
U.S. government to help combat the outbreak but it was considering
doing so.
“We’re exploring ways that aggregated anonymized location
information could help in the fight against covid-19. One example
could be helping health authorities determine the impact of social
distancing, similar to the way we show popular restaurant times and
traffic patterns in Google Maps,” spokesman Johnny Luu said in a
statement, stressing any such partnership “would not involve
sharing data about any individual’s location, movement, or
contacts.”
Government officials also could simply buy location data from
companies that already collect and market such information,
typically from apps that gather the locations of their users. Such
data is readily accessible but regarded by technology experts as
less comprehensive and reliable than data from other sources.
There are technical limits as well. Even the most granular
cellphone data can be imprecise, potentially complicating its use
as a logbook for establishing close interpersonal contact. Most
GPS-enabled smartphones are accurate only within a roughly 15-foot
radius and can be obstructed by trees and roofs.
Many privacy advocates recall a previous national tragedy, the
Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, not only for the human toll in
deaths and dislocation but the U.S. government’s subsequent moves
to aggressively gain access to sensitive data through technical
means and expanded legal authorities.
The full sweep of that data grab only became clear years later,
perhaps most powerfully when former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden shared a huge trove of classified
information with The Washington Post and other news organizations
in 2013.
That history looms over the current debate.
“It would be very unfortunate if the government’s failure to
conduct testing when it had the opportunity now became the reason
for expanded surveillance authority,” said Marc Rotenberg,
president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research
and advocacy group based in Washington.
The source of location data and how it was acquired could affect
how useful it is to government health experts. Ryan Calo, an
associate law professor at the University of Washington, said
location-sharing partnerships between government and industry, like
phone location data or GPS-sharing apps, could serve as critical
tools for officials wanting to know, for instance, where crowds are
violating social-distance rules or which hospitals are dangerously
strained.
But other ideas now being pursued in the U.S., including consumer
apps where people are mapped based on their self-submitted health
status, threaten to promote a false sense of security that could
leave more people at risk.
“The immediate and obvious trouble is where you purport to convert
that information that’s crowdsourced, that’s imperfect, that can be
gamed, into some kind of broader knowledge that people can deploy
to avoid getting infected,” Calo said
Answer the following questions from the article above.
Question 1- QR codes are proposed as a potential location-tracking solution in the article. Identify three other emerging technologies that could be relevant and describe how they might be useful.
Question 2- . Identify three potential applications of intelligent information systems suggested by the article.
Question 3- Identify three potential applications of management support systems suggested by the article.
Course- Management information system
1- Three emerging technologies that could be relevant for location tracking solution are as follows:
· Fog Computing: It is an emerging decentralized technology which uses IoT and combines it with data processed by individual so as to maintain a track of his mobility. It can emerge to be an efficient location tracking solution as in current scenario, every individual uses Internet. Fog Computing will use the digital footprints of individual to track his location.
· Satellite Tracking: Though it has been existing for a while, the cope of satellite tracking was limited for terrorist activities. The functionality of satellite tracking can be extended to track the mobility of targeted individual in daily life.
· RFID: RFID is radio frequency identification. Microchips are used to detect the signal of mobility of the targeted subject.
2- . Three potential applications of intelligent information systems as suggested by the article:
· Intelligent information system has access to mass location data. This facilitates tracking of individuals in pandemic situation of COVID-19 and violation of social distancing
· The intelligent information system can be used to keep a track of the individuals who have been asked to remain in self-quarantine for a minimum of 14 days, across the world.
· Intelligent information system can be used for analysing the effect of social distancing in various regions across the world. This will help in assessing the contagious potential of COVID-19 in different climatic conditions.
3- Three potential applications of management support systems suggested by the article:
· MSS can help in centralizing the medical records of citizens across the country. This will facilitate easy detection of ailments and faster decision about the treatment
· MSS can be used to keep a track of the locations across the world which need thorough screening as well as aggressive testing. This will help us in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic effectively
· MSS can be used to identify the people who may be potential coronavirus patients. Such patients need to be sent for quarantine on immediate basis for stopping the chain of spread.