In a nutshell, Exposure Notification alone cannot determine causality of an infection. A full contact “graph”, on the other hand, can discover carriers with mild to no symptoms. Furthermore, it has been well-established that a significant fraction of COVID-19 infections show mild or no symptoms for extended periods of time – these are not “rare” events. These individuals are infectious but are well enough to walk briskly through crowded metro stations and eat at hawker stalls. Thus, in the “local context” of Singapore, asymptomatic carriers can seed dozens of clusters in a matter of days if not hours, unlike less dense countries like the US, where infectious individuals may come in contact with only a handful of people on any given day.
The inability to quickly identify and isolate mildly symptomatic super-spreaders motivates the development of the local TraceTogether solution, which unlocks the potential for “full graph” contact tracing.
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At our session on Friday, the TraceTogether token team stated that Singapore needs hardware tokens to better serve two groups: the underprivileged, and iPhone users. The underprivileged can’t afford to buy a smartphone; and iPhone users can only run Apple-approved protocols, such as their Exposure Notification service (which does not enable full contact tracing).
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The tracing token (as proposed by Singapore) can reveal your location and identity to the government. Nominally, this happens at the point where you surrender your token to the health authorities. However, in theory, the government could deploy tens of thousands of TraceTogether receivers around the island to record the movement of your token in real-time. While this is problematic, it’s relevant to compare this against your smartphone, which typically broadcasts a range of unique, unencrypted IDs, ranging from the IMEI to the wifi MAC address. Because the smartphone’s identifiers are not anonymized by default, they are potentially usable by anyone – not just the government – to identify you and your approximate location. Thus, for better or for worse, the design of the TraceTogether token does not meaningfully change the status quo as far as “big infrastructure” attacks on individual privacy.
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As a result the government is, perhaps inadvertently, empowering citizens to rebel against the TraceTogether system: one can always crush their token and “opt-out” of the system (but please remove the battery first, otherwise you may burn down your flat). Or perhaps more subtly, you can “forget your token at home”, or carry it in a metallized pouch to block its signal. The physical embodiment of the token also means that once the COVID-19 pandemic is under control, destroying the token definitively destroys the data within it – unlike an app, where too often uninstalling the app simply means an icon is removed from your screen, but some data is still retained as a file somewhere on the device.
In other words, a physical token means that an earnest conversation about privacy can continue in parallel with the collection of contact tracing data. So even if you are not sure about the benefit of TraceTogether today, carrying the token allows you to defer the final decision of whether to trust the government until the point where you are requested to surrender your token for contact trace extraction.
From the blog post:
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