
On the problems with automated contact tracing - dotcoma
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1296248163653660672
======
tompccs
This is spot on and I think the reason why no country has been successful at
digital contact tracing. The human factor is so important. In the UK we have
recently scrapped our big, centralised contract tracing service because, among
other reasons, people have been conditioned by years of robocalls to ignore
out-of-area calls. So they have switched to smaller, local contact tracing
centres embedded into the community. Plus, it's easy to send someone round if
they don't pick up the phone.

~~~
willtim
> people have been conditioned by years of robocalls to ignore out-of-area
> calls.

This is so true!

~~~
giarc
In a somewhat recent local election, polling was showing the incumbent party
winning easily. Of course, on election night, the left leaning party won and
displaced the party that lead my province for 40 years, a huge upset that no
one predicted.

It was also an election full of robocalls, mainly by the incumbent party. My
thoughts on why polling was so off is that the only people answering their
phone were those that supported the incumbents.

If you are a person supporting Party X and they are calling each day with a
pre-recorded message, you may be more likely to answer. You are more likely to
continue to answer your phone and respond to a pollster. If you support Party
Y and the only phone calls you get are robocalls from Party X, you stop
answering your phone, including those calls from the pollsters. Therefore the
pollsters are actually measuring who is willing to answer their phone.

------
tastroder
Link without all those ads.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/12962481673194823...](https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/1296248167319482375)

Don't really follow his logic there. Contact tracing is a manual process, thus
digital contact tracing apps bad because of that one Michigan app that's
actively stupid and a few other failed attempts? That whole argument seems to
make major leaps and ignores more sensible approaches to the degree that I'm
unable to contact trace whatever point he was originally trying to make. Sure,
some people took the "just throw tech at it without thinking" approach but
that happens everywhere these days.

~~~
throwanem
The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is this
industry's _only_ approach, and it's an approach that, in a situation like
this, not only can't help but can't even help but be actively harmful.

I have some relevant experience here. Back almost a decade ago, while I was
working as a staff engineer for a local medical school's genomics institute, I
was briefly involved with some tooling work for a project that aimed to
characterize the spread and prevalence of various STDs among Baltimore's at-
risk youth. Contact tracing was of course a major part of that, but where
today's (or 2012's!) tech industry would just shrug and stick New
Project.xcodeproj in front of an unsecured Mongo store, the doctors and public
health professionals running _this_ project built _free clinics_. Yes, there
was an app involved - a tablet app for _doctors_ to use, in documenting what
their patients told them about whom they'd been with, when, and so forth. But,
unlike some, they knew better than to assume that any app could by itself do
the job for them, rather than they themselves needing to go out and serve the
community they wanted the chance to learn more about.

You know. _Contact tracing._ As opposed to, slapping together a pile of React
Native and throwing it on an app store in hopes of grabbing some VC bucks and
making a get-rich-quick exit - or even Apple and Google getting together and
actually engineering something that's technically very sound and _still
totally useless_ because it can only ever be purely quantitative in a single
dimension, physical proximity, and - as I learned when I was asked to help out
with building data models for it - contact tracing is not and never can be a
one-dimensional problem.

That's the point Doctorow is making here. And for all that I'm not a big fan
of the guy, in this case he's nailed it dead square in the bullseye.

~~~
roenxi
> The point he's making is that "just throw tech at it without thinking" is
> this industry's only approach...

More subtly, his point is that tech is choosing to do what is easy, not what
is necessary.

Tech has had some great successes doing this in the past (see also _Worse is
Better_ ). It isn't a very good approach though when the relationships are
mandatory and the data sensitive.

~~~
throwanem
Sure.

Looking at it in the most generous fashion possible, it's an example of what
happens when the low-hanging fruit lasts so long that people forget what
ladders are for.

Looking at it with the experience of two decades spent in and around this
industry, it's the latest in a long and depressing series of reasons why
unicorn factory farming needs to die.

------
cameldrv
If we actually wanted contact tracing to work, we'd go with an all of the
above strategy, including telling people when they get their positive test to
go ahead and immediately call everyone who they can think of that they've had
contact with in the past few days.

Analog contact tracing is great because if the tracer is good, they can help
evaluate the risk of a situation -- duration of exposure, mask usage,
distance, etc.

Digital contact tracing is great because it can potentially reach people who
the case doesn't know personally or have contact information for. You're not
going to be able to provide a phone number for the person sitting at the next
table at the restaurant.

Self contact tracing is great because it can potentially happen faster.

Of course, in order for contact tracing to have much value, you have to have a
place for people to quarantine. That seems to be the missing link in many
places. There was just a story in the NYT about an immigrant family who lived
in a two bedroom apartment with nine people. The mom caught COVID and tried to
isolate by sleeping in the closet, but this was not successful. If governments
want to get serious, they need to provide out of home quarantine free of
charge. This was very successful in Wuhan as a mandatory program, but IMO you
would get good compliance if you just told people that they should go to a
free hotel room for two weeks and that meals would be delivered.

~~~
natcombs
>> call everyone who they can think of that they've had contact with in the
past few days.

How do I call the subway travelers? How do call the people at the pizza
parlor? How do I call the people who bumped me in line at the grocer?

~~~
cameldrv
Like I said, this is why you want all of the above. Digital contact tracing
can do that.

------
rsynnott
This is, like, just wrong, at least for the implementations I’m familiar with.
The intent of the decentralised apps used in Europe is to supplement manual
contact tracing; I don’t think anyone has claimed they can replace it. They’re
useful for the case of, say, the person who was sitting behind you at the
restaurant for an hour, who is at risk but who the manual tracer won’t find.

I would agree that dodgy non-state-sanctioned centralised ones are a problem,
and should arguably be banned. But they’re far from the whole story.

------
Closi
Everyone looks at automated contact tracing as an alternative to manual
contact tracing, where really they should complement each other.

For a successful app a government needs to weave together both into a seamless
user experience.

------
gmuslera
A lot depend on implementation of the app (is more a concept, is like putting
Clippy along some modern well-tought assistant and saying that everyone in
every possible situation are bad), and a lot on the stage of the pandemy on a
country (or potentially delimited enough region). And also how easily/fast you
can get tested and how that scales and how responsible is the average citizen.

In US or Brazil, where the virus is very widespread, it will give you a lot of
false alerts (and a few right ones). In countries where the cases are
relatively few and spread apart, having good warnings about being close enough
with some of those rare cases may be the key to avoid spreading it. Once
exposed, you can go around up a lot of days without developing symptoms, an
early warning could limit how you interact with others at the very least (and
getting yourself tested if in doubt).

But a bad implementation is not a reason to discard the concept, at least, not
that alone.

------
tzs
> It doesn't tell you about the circumstances - like, was it one of the people
> at that eyeball-licking party? Or someone in the next car in a traffic jam?

For most people I suspect that this wouldn't really make much difference.

In my state, approximately 1% of the population is known to have had COVID.
That's over the whole course of the pandemic so far. I haven't seen the
numbers for number of active cases, but looking at the total case curve, I'd
estimate active cases are at least an order of magnitude less.

My chances of actually encountering anyone with COVID are pretty low when I'm
out, and I try to minimize the number of times I go out. Even if everyone in
my state were using an automated contact tracing app, I'd probably only be
getting an alert once a month or so, and that's probably overestimating it.

So, once a month or so I'd need to get a test, and then stay at home for a day
waiting for results. Since periodic testing is actually a good anyway, this
would not be very disruptive at all. The only real disruption for me would be
that for a test in response to an alert, I should stay at home until I get the
result. For a test done as part of general periodic testing, there would be no
specific need to stay home waiting for the result.

But with alerts only happening every month or so, it would not be a big deal
even if most of the alerts are from traffic instead of eyeball-licking
parties.

And that's assuming I respond to each alert by getting tested and staying home
a day. Instead, I could think about what I did the last two weeks. If I've
only encountered people 2 meters away, in passing, with both of us wearing
masks (which is in fact true for most two week periods for me), except for
people in other cars on the road, then I could ignore the alert.

Edit: I looked up the data for my county. We have 70 active cases in a
population of 276000, so about 0.03%. There have been 923 total cases, so
about 0.3%.

------
heisenzombie
The Covid App in New Zealand doesn't use the bluetooth apple/google method.
Rather, it is based on QR codes that are printed and posted by every business.

I was initially pretty disappointed in this approach, but I have changed my
mind, and now agree with Cory Doctorow, and the New Zealand method.

The app just keeps a (local, temporary) diary of when/where you check in.
That's pretty much it. If you talk to a contact tracer, you can send them your
diary as a way to augment other sources of information: Your memory, your bank
statements, your transit card info, etc.

I was disappointed with the app because I thought there was no way it would be
effective as a complete contact tracing solution. I now understand that of
course _no_ app could do that. Better to have something modest that fits
nicely into a wider strategy.

------
usrusr
This could have been a nice little writeup of arguments in the decentralized
tracing vs centralized location-based tracking approaches. But it is framed in
the introduction as an argument in favor of manual tracing vs apps in general
and fails massively to live up to that claim by focusing exclusively on the
badness of central/location.

Centralized, geo-based apps have a million ways of failing at privacy and real
life implementations will likely strike a few? Who would have guessed, that's
why the proximity-only decentralized approach exists.

And those "most at risk students" who would be least likely to actively use a
privacy-encroaching location tracker? They'll be invisible to manual contact
tracing for exactly the same reasons. The situation of those people would make
a very good example for how decentralized, proximity only apps can not only be
better than location tracking but also play an important role stepping in
where the manual approach has blind spots. But somehow it's used as an
argument against apps in general.

~~~
mikro2nd
It's Twitter. You were expecting a nuanced, carefully planned and well thought
out essay?

This tweetstorm by Cory is one of the reasons why I keep trying to persuade
people to get a blog (again) rather than rambling at length via tweets. A blog
post demands at least a minimum of planning and upfront thought about what you
want to say, as opposed to being a stream-of-conscious sequence of bite-sized
quotes, hopefully connected. Now perhaps some people _do_ plan their
tweetstorms carefully, but the medium hardly encourages that or lends itself
to a process of vetting, rewriting and editing.

Twitter has its uses. Long (for some value of 'long' here!) form writing is
not that.

~~~
corin_
While I don't disagree in general, worth pointing out for anyone who hasn't
used Twitter "threads" that you can now write all your threaded tweets before
posting the first one - so it's not _quite_ as bad as when you had to write a
tweet, send, reply to it, send, repeat etc

------
blisterpeanuts
What if students swap phones, or pick up a burner phone? They can then go off
campus with impunity. Apparently phones are used as student I.D. at Albion,
but that won't stop anyone. Hide your phone near the entrance to campus when
you leave.

Without surgical implants or home incarceration bracelets, you can't
realistically track people who don't want to be tracked.

~~~
jjgreen
> Without surgical implants or home incarceration bracelets

Don't give them ideas ...

------
thinkingemote
If only this Twitter user had a blog to write on.... (/S he is a famous author
and tech blogger and should know better).

Or if only each tweet had, instead of just a page number, also an indication
of total number of pages. Like 10/15 ("oh, only five more tweets") instead of
a useless count 5 ("oh I'm on tweet number five, that's of no use to me as
I've read the previous four")

In the end I gave up after a few tweets . I would have liked to be able to say
I gave up half way but there was no way for me to know that.

Edits: there are 23 tweets.

~~~
criddell
I get what you are saying, but there's something to be said for going where
your audience is. I'm just glad this wasn't on Tik Tok.

Edit: Am I hallucinating? I could have sworn the first time I opened this, it
went to
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1296248163653660672.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1296248163653660672.html)

------
aboringusername
I think the whole idea of 'contact tracing' isn't really _that_ valuable in
the long term anyway. New Zealand recently broke their 100-day free streak,
and Australia has implemented strict lockdown measures, as well as South
Korea.

Most important is understanding the virus in the community - getting people
tested (which they don't have to do), and spotting trends (positive person
lives in "X" community, we get data on how many people also test positive in
the same place) is more important than knowing whether you were in close
contact with your friend Betty or where you were at 13:37 5 days ago.

It's hilarious Google/Apple thought "hmm yes, Bluetooth! The perfect protocol
to help prevent the spread of a pandemic", and it has spectacularly, and
utterly failed. Their APIs are an embarrassment and should've been removed a
long time ago. Their arrogance in thinking that crappy protocol can have any
part to play in human health/wellbeing is just mind mindbogglingly idiotic.

Apps will not help a pandemic, apart from in the US where they masturbate over
your data and want to know your location every second, who your contacts are,
who you talk to, what messages you send them, how they can profile/target you
better for ads, and how they can feed "big data" machines to later fuck
you/others over with more measured/accurate data or AI systems (like
clearview) for law enforcement. Hence the whole no US-wide "GDPR" thing
because they _really_ want your data.

If your testing capability is low, and if people are not being tested, then
everything else is a waste of time. Then you add in societal failures like not
getting sick pay, or paid time off if you've got the virus, or incentives to
work regardless and you realize 'contact tracing' is just another data
gathering excuse.

Because we don't 'contact trace' the flu, or other sicknesses, we accept them
as they happen and are a part of life. As the Coronavirus dies down, it'll be
in the same bucket, where people just have it, get over it, and that's all
there is to it.

Contact tracing has failed in any substantial form, as the recent outbreaks
across the world have demonstrated.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
I hate to rain on a good rant, but do you have any actual data to back up all
these strong assertions?

Contact tracing (the old fashioned kind) works quite well when it's done
aggressively and case counts are low. However, for most of the Western world
neither is true, and throwing Bluetooth at the problem isn't going to help.
Neither can it magically prevent infections from people who don't know they're
contagious, which we've come to realize is a significant feature of how COVID
spreads.

~~~
vertis
Agreed, Australia and NZ are doing aggressive manual contact tracing (in
addition to the app that was released in Australia in April).

Last I checked NZ had managed to link all but two of the cases back to the one
source.

Victoria (AU) likewise has managed to trace the majority of cases to a breach
in the quarantine hotel, because security guards weren't wearing PPE and were
sharing a cigarette lighter (if I am correct).

It's part of a tool chest, as is the lockdown, the masks. As much as I am glad
not to be locked in Australia/NZ right now, I am proud of how they've been
handling it in general.

