When the coronavirus pandemic hit, L.A. County hired more than 2,500 workers to manually keep track of contact tracing. But the rate at which COVID-19 spread overwhelmed the system. LA Times reporter Sam Dean writes civic leaders are now encouraging residents to download a popular—but controversial—safety app to help the process.
The manual work of contact tracing involves asking people who test positive for the coronavirus to list everywhere they have been and everyone they have seen in recent days, then tracking down anyone they have encountered and testing them before they spread the virus further. However, the rate of community spread in Los Angeles is overwhelming the county’s capacity and Public Health officials encouraged Angelenos to download the app called SafePass.
The app uses the Bluetooth signal on your phone to check if you’ve been near other people who tested positive for coronavirus.
SafePass does not tell you who exposed you and where you were exposed, and there have been concerns over data privacy.
“The app is tracking where you go and who you come in contact with so on a basic level they know where you are. Sometimes it also uses the GPS signal to see if you’re close to people on top of the Bluetooth to make it more accurate. So, there could be a lot of privacy concerns if that ended up in law enforcement hands, and you don’t want law enforcement to know who you’ve been talking to. The potential is infinite for people tracking where you go and who you see. But, the company says they have strong data protection and delete user data after 30 days. And, if you delete the app, they’ll delete everything that has to do with your information in it after 24 hours,” said Times reporter, Dean.
The company Sp0n developed an app called Citizen, but that was not its name at first.
“It began as Vigilante in 2016 when it first hit the App Store, and it was pretty similar to what Citizen is today, where it alerts you to local kind of mayhem crimes using a 911 scanner to feed local events onto a map nearby. But, in its original iteration when it was called Vigilante, it urged users to go run to the scene of a crime to shoot video and to upload it for more people to watch,” said Dean.
Within about 48 hours, the app was removed from the App Store because Apple thought it was a risk to public safety. However, it then relaunched as Citizen with more money behind it, because it had gone viral.
Citizen expanded to Los Angeles in spring 2019. In the last 18 months, the company says about 1 million people are using the app in L.A. County, and that caught the attention of L.A. leaders when it came to contact tracing.
“Because the County has this 2,500 strong manual contact tracing team, their rationale was that it was better than nothing. If some people get caught on the app with contact tracing and get informed that way, it is better than if they weren’t informed at all. So, we might as well throw it out there too,” added Dean.