There are very likely a substantial number of Australians, particularly older, less technologically literate people, who have downloaded the government’s surveillance app in the belief that it will actually protect them against COVID-19 infection — that the app itself will somehow deliver prophylactic benefit.
The government has strongly encouraged this misapprehension by constantly linking the app and safety. It’s in the very name: COVIDSafe.
Downloading the app “makes the country safe for you”, chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said. The app will deliver a “COVID safe environment” according to the prime minister. “The higher the number of people who have downloaded COVIDSafe app, then the safer you are.” The PM even compared the app to sunblock. “Slip, slop, slap the app.”
This was wilful and cynical deception by the government, encouraging people to download the app in the delusion that it would actually prevent infection, acting like a sunblock for the virus — unless, of course, the prime minister and chief medical officer don’t understand the most basic science and themselves think the app will prevent infection.
The fact that the app won’t even be doing the job it is supposed to be doing for another week, and has a fundamental problem on iPhones anyway, makes the government’s deception particularly shameful.
Still, terrifying some elderly people into downloading the app, or terrifying them more when they discover their phone can’t download it or anything else, is worth it, right, because of what the app will deliver?
Except, the app won’t deliver much. It will generate large numbers of false positives and false negatives — the person on the other side of a wall from you for 15 minutes who tests positive, the long-gone supermarket shopper whose COVID-19 you acquire.
What it will deliver, primarily, is a false sense of security for people and a sense that something is being done.
Which, by the way, is standard for technological solutionism.
That’s the belief that a social or economic problem can be solved at a stroke, or maybe a keystroke, with some great new piece of tech, without anyone having to make hard decisions or undergo sacrifices. It’s the inflation of micro-level solutions — a particular tool will help me with a problem or address a need of mine — to complex, macro-, global-level problems.
Worried about climate change? Carbon capture and storage will solve it — you can keep using coal-fired power and not worry. No actual change needed, no restructuring of carbon-intensive industry or energy networks, no price signal or tax.
Worried about terrorism or crime? Facial recognition will address it. Concerned about resource access? The Internet of Things will solve it. Congestion? Pollution? Health problems? Artificial intelligence will fix them. Algorithms. Big data. There isn’t a problem that Big Data hasn’t been claimed to offer a solution for.
The current era of tech solutions goes back to the start of the digital age, when the internet was going to bring down dictatorships, rather than enable them to better surveil their populations (and I speak as a former internet evangelist myself).
As becomes obvious quickly, the spruikers of tech solutions are the ones with the most to gain from unthinking embrace of their creations. That’s why tech solutions is so closely linked to Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurs.
But they find willing believers among policymakers because they invariably offer shortcuts to problems that otherwise require hard work, political risk or harm to vested interests to resolve. They peddle win-win outcomes in which problems are fixed without anyone having to incur a cost.
That’s exactly what the government is offering at the moment: download the app and we can immediately revert to life before the pandemic, without further lockdown, economic cost or inconvenience.
Technological solutionism, though, comes with recurring features, all of which have been demonstrated by the Morrison government’s surveillance app.
First, simple solutions rarely work as well as spruikers claim — even when, unlike Morrison and Murphy, they don’t misrepresent the tech. The surveillance app doesn’t help protect against the virus, to state the obvious, nor does it provide a good guide to whether someone may have been infected. It merely provides more information for people tasked with tracing possible contacts of an infected person, but much of that information may be entirely spurious.
Just as getting access to communications metadata has flooded law enforcement with useless data that often complicates investigations, the app — even when it works properly — will likely provide a large volume of useless information, while missing crucial pieces of data.
Second, they cause unintended consequences and downstream effects. One consequence of the app is that people, believing the app exercises some magical prophylactic effect, will be less inclined to protect themselves through measures we know work — social distancing, regular handwashing, better public hygiene. Result: a greater chance of infection.
Third, tech discriminates because it is made by humans who discriminate, consciously and unconsciously. The racial biases built into facial recognition and AI by Silicon Valley engineers are well known — Google has even devoted extensive resources to trying to address them. The app discriminates against the technologically illiterate, or those who can’t afford a smart phone — or, as it turns out, iPhone users.
And fourth, many tech solutions, offered as positive solutions to real problems, become vehicles for serious problems themselves. Personal data-based tech contains inherent risks to privacy that mean even the most innocuous applications can, in the wrong hands, be used for very sinister ends. Our own government has misused innocuous data collections like personal information of welfare recipients. The power provided by data proves irresistible to those already in power.
The old saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is, applies more than ever in a world of self-interested tech spruikers and lazy governments.
Usual poor quality government tech development.
To get to 40% will need to add a real incentive like cannot use public transport unless have the app on your phone even if just acting as a placebo or placeholder for what comes next
Please!! Don’t give them ideas!! This is just more tech hype, like 5G. I believe the tech industry is the most dishonest one around, worse even than the legal and property ones.
I have an i-phone – an older model at that. A friend with the same model says his wouldn’t download the app. I have no reason not to believe him.
Are you advocating that I should be forced to spend upwards of $500 on a new phone so I can get Scott Morrison’s “broadbrim hat and sunscreen”? Or else I shouldn’t be allowed on public transport?
Not going to happen. I’ll just stay at home.
Last week I heard one of the ABC government echo-parrot presenters speaking as if the app would alert him to his being in close proximity to someone who was carrying.
As for Scotty From Marketing and his “COVID safe environment” along with Murphy’s furphy that it “makes the country safe for you”? How was it safe when you’ve caught it from someone and the app is used to trace their contacts (to people like you) – it’s too late then Bren.
“Where the bloody hell was your magic app when I caught this virus, Scotty and Brendan?”?
82-year-old Mum thought the same thing – her phone would instantly alert her to the presence of a dangerous covid-carrier – and was getting upset that she couldn’t get it to download. When I explained to her what it would and would not achieve, she decided not to bother – she couldn’t imagine any situation in the foreseeable future where she’d be spending 15 minutes in close proximity to a stranger. Continuing her social distancing is a far more useful and safer option for her and her age group.
She’s loving online grocery shopping, by the way.
I can still remember the moment in The Wizard of Oz, when it turns out the all powerful wizard is simply a small bald fat man sitting behind a desk. His hopes his perceived hype and scale will convince all, finally dashed.
“Scotty from Marketing”s mum must have taken him to see it once too often.
Whilst everyone else realised the wizard was an imposter, Scotty must have been convinced he’d found his life role model.
We might have felt differently about the app if it had been presented for what it is. A minor assist to the critical process of contact tracking, that needed more thought and testing before being unleashed on us.
Scotty never realises that those moments, like when he had his arm over Malcolm’s shoulder and said “he’s my leader” kill forever any sense of trust in his hype.
What small value the app may have had is probably gone forever.
We aspire to follow leaders whose humility is tangible and from whom we can feel the ring of credibility.
Regardless of the idiotic things our PM might utter, and the technical failings of the app, it may be useful in contact tracing. The big deal there is that it could reveal asymptomatic carriers, who are the most problematic aspect of the spread of the coronavirus. No, it won’t save YOUR life (by the time you get the phone call you’ve already been in contact with the spreader), but if we can find those people and isolate them, it might save someone else’s life.
It’s not all about you, you know!
Please explain how “…it could reveal asymptomatic carriers…“.
given that they are… what’s the word… asymptomatic.
Yeah, I’d love to know that too!
If you become infected, then it’s likely you caught it from from someone; if you don’t know who, then it’s possibly from an asymptomatic carrier. If you upload the app data (and remember, this is a voluntary action!), then maybe one of the people it reveals could be that carrier and be spreading the virus unknowlingly. That is, of course, if they had the app running on their phone, otherwise, they go on spreading it and the virus continues to circulate. Yes, of course it’s a long shot but so is all of contact tracing. It’s nevertheless one of the essential tools to contain the virus, and is done in consequence of every single positive COVID-19 test.
Nice attempt at a circular argument but, like a doughnut, there’s a hole in the centre.
The pyramid builders figured out that insufficient data is not just worthless but actually dangerous – viz the ‘bent pyramid’ – today that is known as GIGO, “garbage in, garbage out”.
From the start of the launching of this wonderful cure all app I was thinking, how often do I spend 15 minutes in the company of a stranger during any day?
Again as Bernard pointed out how easy it is for someone in a supermarket to cough or sneeze as they are walking past.
The fifteen minute time is ridiculous and could not possibly work effectively and I would suggest that the reason that fifteen minutes was chosen was that a much shorter time would overload the system with so much data that it couldn’t possibly work either.