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April 26, 2020 01:39 am

Should GPS Also Be Used For Contact Tracing?

Reuters reports:Google and Apple have sought to build public trust by emphasizing that the changes they are making to Bluetooth to allow the tracing apps to work will not tap phones' GPS sensors, which privacy activists see as too intrusive. But the states pioneering the apps -- North and South Dakota, and Utah -- say allowing public health authorities to use GPS in tandem with Bluetooth is key to making the system viable... Apple and Google said on Friday that they still have not decided how to proceed. "I would encourage them to go for the 'and' and not the 'or' solution," North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum said of Apple and Google in an interview late Thursday. "During this new normal, there is a place for having solutions that protect privacy and enable more efficient contact tracing," said Burgum... "What Utah wanted to understand is not just who is spreading [the virus] to whom but also location zones," said Jared Allgood, chief strategy officer for Twenty, the startup which developed Utah's app for an initial $1.75 million. GPS location data allows authorities to decide which businesses may need to be closed because the virus is spreading there, and prioritize which contacts of diagnosed patients to test... Anonymized GPS location data is already playing a key role in an early version of Care19, an app that about 40,000 people have signed up for in North and South Dakota. Authorities currently ask Care19 users to give them permission for timestamped GPS location data, which allows officials to manually call places where users could have spread the virus and ask for names and numbers of others who may have been there at the same time. North Dakota's governor suggests that not everyone is concerned about sharing their GPS data. "Some people are completely opposed to an intrusion on privacy," he told Reuters, "but there's a younger generation sharing their location on dozens of apps. There may be a set of people highly social, young and going out to bars who may see this tool as fantastic." And Yahoo News reports another concern about contact tracing. "Some argue the information should be pushed out to a central server managed by a trustworthy government or health care entity, while others insist that data remain on individual devices."

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