By Ron Rock and Mike Moran

Some 4.8 million people around the world – a figure comparable to the entire population of Ireland – had died of COVID-19 by October 11, according to the World Health Organization, and many of them died well after the behavior and risks associated with the virus were well understood.

Despite unprecedented successes by pharmaceutical researchers in quickly producing multiple vaccines, the world’s response to this one-in-a-lifetime existential threat has been anything but impressive. Divisions between rich and poor, along racial and geographic lines, all exacerbated by conspiracy theories, have produced the tragic figure above. What’s worse, COVID-19, which many in the rich West seem to think is over, may not be even halfway through with us as it continues to mutate and rage through unvaccinated populations both in the developed world and in developing lands where vaccinations rates are just pushing into double digits.

Since March, 2020, shortly after the severity of the pandemic became clear, Microshare has watched this unfolding tragedy with a special kind of dismay. Since the start, we have been at the forefront of containing the virus, or at least blunting its spread, with a wearable contact tracing solution that allows our clients to quickly identify people who may have been infected by a colleague reporting symptoms. We are proud that giant, global manufacturers and logistics firms like GlaxosmithKline, Rent-A-Center and XPO have trusted us to keep staff and their loved ones safe from major outbreaks and their production lines and warehouses humming along. After all, in manufacturing, warehousing and other “hard” sectors, sending to work remotely isn’t really an option.

While we helped secure a small swath of humanity, we also can’t help wondering how many more could have been saved had Big Tech and many national and local governments not devoted so much time with the deeply flawed concept of smart phone-based contact tracing apps. When word emerged in early April 2020 that Google and Apple were collaborating on a contact tracing smartphone app to help manage the spread of COVID-19, everyone at our little technology firm was happy to hear it. We knew the idea of an app tracing people’s movements would clearly compete with our own wearable Bluetooth solution, but we thought the idea was different enough to be complementary. The Google-Apple approach would log “contact events” in the great, wide-open, while ours focused on the offices, factories, mines and other workplaces where density is almost impossible to avoid. Techies at heart, we were genuinely happy that, after a long period of bad ink for Big Tech, the old altruism that initially attracted us to technology as a career seemed to have returned.

‘A social problem, not a tech problem’

But doubts about the smartphone approach quickly occurred to us. First of all, a global pandemic requires globally accessible solutions and smartphone penetration in the developing world lags the OECD figure badly. Secondly, we knew from our own conversations with those scrambling to protect their people that smartphones simply can’t exist in some environments. Factories where they pose a dangerous distraction; mines and other environments impenetrable to Wi-Fi. And what about seniors? The poor and those on the other side of the digital divide? We realized smartphone contact tracing would exclude precisely those people in the United States most at risk of developing COVID-19.

By April, we were trying to sound the alarm, and to the media’s credit, some listened. In April 2020, Mike was quoted on the front page of the Financial Times, arguably the world’s most influential financial newspaper, warning that the Apple-Google approach would be resisted by people worried about privacy issues, and would also leave the half the planet that cannot afford smart phones vulnerable.

“It’s really a stunning blind spot to think that there’s somehow been universal adoption of smartphones,” The FT quoted him as saying. “It’s just not true. And in fact the most vulnerable populations in the world are exactly the ones that don’t have them.” Coverage from The New York Times, BBC, Fast Company and many others followed as it dawned on people that Big Tech was not going to ride to humanity’s rescue.

Our CTO, Tim Panagos, also expressed concern, noting that the flaw in the Apple-Google smart phone idea was not necessarily technological: “Oh, it will work,” he told a company meeting in May 2020. “That’s just the problem; given Big Tech’s reputation for harvesting and selling people’s data, this isn’t really a technological problem. It’s a social problem.”

Sure enough, from Hong Kong to New York City and everywhere in between that attempted to deploy app-based contact tracing, uptake was anemic. Even in jurisdictions where civil liberties take a back seat to government decrees and smart phone penetration is virtually complete – Singapore, for instance – smart phone-based apps largely failed due to public resistance.

Gerard Goggin, a Professor at the University of Sydney and the Technical University in Singapore, sees social resistance as a key obstacle to smart phone contact tracing.

“Health information is an area of considerable sensitivity for most people,” he wrote in a scholarly article in for the global SAGE Public Emergency Collective, a consortium of scientists and academics sharing discoveries about the virus. “Trust is key, and with the widespread diffusion of mobile communication there has been considerable work on how to design and implement systems that can support cooperative and sustainable sharing of information between people and authorities to map the spread of infectious diseases. … It is difficult not to see the turn to tracing apps as a pivotal moment in the expansion and entrenchment of surveillance technology in digital societies, of which Singapore in particular has been a leading example – but is also playing out in contests and debates in many countries especially in Europe and Asia.”

Privacy and consent

Microshare’s approach – Bluetooth wristbands or lanyards – had another important advantage: transparency. Well before the pandemic, we had been forthright about engaging in the privacy debate, and clear minded about the tradeoffs that any technology has when it comes to costs and benefits to society.

So when we developed Universal Contact Tracing, we decided a wearable was the way to go, in part because the wearer would know (and thus provide an implied consent) that as long as she or he had it one, they were being tracked. We insisted that the UCT wearable not hoover up Personally Identifiable Information (PII) 24/7 the way smart phones do and designed a solution meant to traced people only when they were on a particular premises. UCT never collects PII and operates in what is technically known as a pseudonymous manner: That is, the dashboards and databases logging contact events do not indicate names, only badge numbers. Only when a person reported symptoms of the virus would the identities of those who had contact events with the infected person be unmasked, and then only to a small group responsible for administering the UCT program. At that point, a database query would like badge numbers to those exposed, and proper communications and advice would follow.

Understanding of both the challenges of contact tracing and its enormous potential for good means facing the privacy issue squarely. The two of us have been vocal in our view that every digital interaction requires transparency and a careful weighing of the tradeoffs. Data can save lives, perhaps millions of lives. In return, some degree of privacy must be voluntarily surrendered. That transaction needs to be as clear as possible, involved explicit consent, minimize the risk of further privacy compromise and be able to be retracted at any moment. Our solution provides all of that; smartphone apps are, to put it bluntly, the exact opposite.

This would merely be a matter of competitive business were it not for the fact that people’s lives and the world’s economic activity are affected. For all the genuine humanity demonstrated by Apple, Google and others pursuing the smartphone approach, it needs to be said plainly: It does not work, and the afterglow of publicity which firms like Apple and Google automatically generate when they make such announcements has resulted in the world’s governments and many private sector players being led down something of a blind alley that risks branding contact tracing generally as not worth the trouble.

The truth could not be more different. Contact Tracing is, at its core, a human detective endeavor. People determined to have been exposed to a COVID-19 carrier, whether by technology or word of mouth, need to be interviewed and their recent movements traced. But at the tip of that spear, the technology that establishes “contact events,” whether that is defined as someone being exposed for 3 minutes within 3 feet of an infected colleague, or 10 minutes within six feet, needs to work and work well. Of our initial seven global clients for UCT, which was designed for an emergency we all thought would be over within a year, six have renewed their contracts, and several have expanded the scope of their engagements and are talking about an “off-the-shelf” option for any future pandemic events.

To us, the idea that humans can be traced throughout their day wherever they go is Dystopian. It borders on delusional to think people will submit willingly. The only way contact tracing technology works is as a tool to help human contact tracers safeguard a particular population. Logically, this best occurs in those environments that science has defined as the most likely incubators of COVID-19 transmission – high density, indoor spaces. To us, ring-fencing places where density is inevitable – environments like workspaces, university and corporate campuses, hospitals, mines, barracks, prisons, where social distancing is clearly going to fail – should always have been the focus of those setting goals. Bringing food processing employees safely back to work. Protecting prison inmates and staff. Safeguarding the crew of a cramped warship or military personnel housed in barracks. Providing assurance to essential office workers. In each instance, it’s easy to recall a tragic headline that proves our point.

Smartphone apps may one day overcome the technical and privacy challenges that are dogging them right now and that might enable a wider “contact tracing in the wild” approach. But the approach simply is not ready for prime time. It’s not enough to produce a product that “works” from a technical standpoint. It needs to work without threatening individual freedom and privacy. Arguing otherwise in the midst of a pandemic is playing around with fire – and millions of people’s lives.

Ellen Brockley | CEO | RRock@microshare.io

Michael Moran | CMO, Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer| MMoran@microshare.io

 Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing wearables are now deployed in 23 countries around the world in manufacturing, residential and office environments.