1/ This is a longer tweet on manual contact tracing and your privacy. Many oppose using tech like bluetooth to fight COVID, arguing manual contact tracing works, it is "tried & true" and has none of the privacy concerns that tech raises. But are those claims true?
2/ Manual contact tracing at the scale to fight COVID has never been done in the US. You can't hire, train and deploy enough people to research and trace fast enough all the contacts. There is not a trained workforce sitting idly by to do the job yet time is of the essence.
3/ The job pays $15-25/hour. When advocates say we get sensitive empaths who can engender trust to get people to disclose sensitive personal information over the phone, I call BS. Where is the evidence that newly trained tracers are successful?
4/ Are tracer calls recorded? Analyzed for quality assurance? Are supervisors correcting bad behavior? Let's be clear, we are not talking about community based, neighborly calling; we are talking about call center scale without the safeguards of commercial grade ops.
5/ For e.g., are tracers doing the work from home or in an operations center? Appears to be both. So what safeguards are there against personnel keeping copies of information on paper or in storage media? Call centers learned long ago the risks of not controlling the environment.
6/ Are new hires subject to criminal background checks? Some places are doing some background checks, but try to find that answer locally. Thousands of callers will beget thousands of scammers too. How will people know who is one the line and they are legit?
7/ Critics of digital tracing argue there are no metrics to see if it works. What are the manual tracing metrics? It takes 3-5 days to reach contacts based on what I've found, but no stats on how many contacts can't be reached, don't cooperate, don't answer calls, etc.
8/ How does the data get from the call to some usable medium? Does the tracer take notes and then transfer them into an online survey? What happens to the notes? What happens to the survey? Some places use enterprise class CRM for the results, others, well, good guessing.
9/ For state and local authorities not outsourcing storage, how are they securing the data? Who has access? Under what supervision or auditing? How long is it retained and under what policies? If someone gives data about another person, can he/she find out, correct or remove it?
10/ If data is breached, does sovereign immunity for the public health agency protect them, their employees and contractors from liability? What are the stats on bad behavior and firing bad actors, or has that really never happened?
11/ Before I get too trolled for diss'ing contact tracers, I too see the job as critical to fighting a pandemic. But manual tracing's efficacy is being used to fight digital contact tracing without acknowledging the more serious risks with the manual approach. Let's be honest.
12/ Some argue we should not deploy any digital efforts until there is an oversight regime in place and we have metrics and hard evidence to see if it works, but they accept a 20th century methodology as effective without question. It's worth asking these questions in BOTH cases.
13/ Here is what the CDC says is needed in skills for contact tracing. Do you think the rapid hiring and a couple of days of training gets you this level of professional service? cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…
14/ We simply don't know if manual contact tracing at scale can work, or whether we can achieve the scale necessary to stop the virus. So it would be at least intellectually honest to admit this is not an argument against augmenting tracing with technology and external data.
15/ Only exposure notification applications can reach unknown exposures. Contact tracing can't. Yet the criticism and distrust of the Google-Apple decentralized approach to exposure notice has been virulent, while crickets as to manual tracing's weaknesses.
16/ Other location apps may support tracing if those infected voluntary offer it up. If you so trust manual tracers, why would/should that data be rejected when we are having manual tracers ask the same questions and location history is more precise and accurate, w/ user optin?
17/ Finally, while I recognize and embrace the critical importance of contact tracing, it is hard to think of a manual process that could benefit more from the application of technology. Sometimes it takes a pandemic to expose the flaws in the system and to find solutions.
18/ For my friends in civil society, question the tech hard - we all benefit from the scrutiny - but please stop elevating manual contact tracing as the reason not to use technology or as sufficient alone to do the job.
