Jane Bambauer and Brian Ray on the Lost Promise of Digital Contact Tracing
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2020
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology was touted as a potential savior. In particular, there was a burst of enthusiasm around so-called digital contact tracing apps, which would track people's movements and interactions and notify them if they had been exposed to COVID. Apple and Google, which together control the operating systems for virtually the entire smartphone market, joined forces and created a standard to help researchers, private entities and governments create contact tracing apps. But despite the early hype, enthusiasm about these apps quickly fizzled, and even today, they remain underdeveloped and rarely used. As part of Lawfare's ongoing Digital Social Contract research paper series, law professors Jane Bambauer from the University of Arizona and Brian Ray from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, published a paper titled, "COVID-19 Apps Are Terrible—They Didn't Have to Be." Alan Rozenshtein sat down with Jane and Brian to talk about why contact tracing never played more than a marginal role in managing the pandemic.
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | We picked when it came to the apps privacy and we didn't really weigh it against anything |
| 0:38.9 | else. |
| 0:40.5 | And that's just crazy. |
| 0:42.2 | We're hurtling towards almost 250,000 deaths and we're on track to lose 4% of GDP. |
| 0:50.1 | But the only thing we can do with apps is protect privacy and that's got to be the priority. |
| 0:55.0 | And then let's see if it works. |
| 0:57.2 | I mean, it's just crazy. |
| 0:59.3 | There's so much room to do even a little bit more at actually fairly minimal cost |
| 1:03.8 | to privacy. |
| 1:04.8 | There are so many more possibilities to try to make these apps work that, you know, it |
| 1:10.2 | wouldn't have saved all those lives and wouldn't save all that GDP. |
| 1:13.7 | But man, it sure could have done something. |
| 1:17.8 | I'm Alan Rosenstein and this is the LawFair podcast December 22nd, 2020. |
| 1:24.4 | In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology was touted as a potential |
| 1:29.0 | savior. |
| 1:30.2 | In particular, there was a burst of enthusiasm around so-called digital contact tracing |
| 1:34.5 | apps, which would track people's movements and interactions and notify them if they |
... |
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