Speaker 1: It's Tuesday, August eighteen. I'm Oscar Ramirez from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America.
Speaker 1: The first bluetooth exposure notification app has launched in Virginia,
Speaker 1: and it's called covid wise. The app uses Bluetooth chirps
Speaker 1: to detect if you've been in close contact with someone
Speaker 1: who has tested a positive. While it's very easy to use,
Speaker 1: for it to really be effective and needs a widespread adoption,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Fowler, tech columnists at The Washington Post joins us
Speaker 1: for this useful app with very little privacy risk. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us, Jeffrey bet I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: this app out of Virginia. It's called covid wise. It's
Speaker 1: an exposure notification app using Bluetooth on your phone. So
Speaker 1: you might have heard some other contact tracing apps with
Speaker 1: regards to coronavirus, this one is a little different. Your
Speaker 1: Bluetooth sends out pings basically, and if you've come into
Speaker 1: contact with somebody for more than fifteen minutes and you're
Speaker 1: within six feet distance, the app might tell you you've
Speaker 1: been exposed. Then you can go get a test. All
Speaker 1: that usually we bring you on on the podcast, Jeff,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about privacy with apps and things like that,
Speaker 1: and in this case, you've kind of runed this thing
Speaker 1: through many tests and you've kind of come to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that your privacy really isn't at risk and it
Speaker 1: would actually be a benefit if people, a lot of
Speaker 1: people downloaded this thing so we can try to keep
Speaker 1: this thing under control. So Jeff, tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about COVID wise and the tests you ran through
Speaker 1: it and what your conclusions were. Nobody was more surprised
Speaker 1: than me. The big problem that a lot of these
Speaker 1: apps and the idea of using our phones to help
Speaker 1: track exposure to the coronavirus has had is that people, frankly,
Speaker 1: just don't trust tech companies and that they just don't
Speaker 1: trust the government. And I can't blame you. Companies have
Speaker 1: done very little to earn that trust in Edward Snowden
Speaker 1: taught us all that the government really can't be trusted either.
Speaker 1: But that said, when Google and Apple the spring got
Speaker 1: together and said, hey, they thought that they had figured
Speaker 1: out a way to make our phones useful for figuring
Speaker 1: out if we were exposed to someone with coronavirus, you know,
Speaker 1: I was intrigued because they said that they were going
Speaker 1: to build it from the ground up with privacy in mind.
Speaker 1: So we finally got the first of these in the US,
Speaker 1: in the state of Virginia called COVID Wise, and it
Speaker 1: came out earlier in August, and the moment it was there,
Speaker 1: I was like, we gotta test this, we gotta see
Speaker 1: if they really live up to the promises. And from
Speaker 1: everything we've been able to tell so far from our testing,
Speaker 1: I had thirty five colleagues at the Post who live
Speaker 1: in Virginia and they're all testing it for me. We
Speaker 1: learned two things. First thing we learned is that it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be really much of a privacy risk
Speaker 1: here these apps. He's bluetooth to communicate two phones nearby.
Speaker 1: They don't collect your location, they don't send information about
Speaker 1: where you've been or her you've been in contact with
Speaker 1: to the government. Is actually a pretty clever system. We
Speaker 1: looked under the hood as well, just just a double check.
Speaker 1: But they weren't sending out more information and then than
Speaker 1: they claimed, and they weren't those first thing we learned.
Speaker 1: The second thing we learned is we still don't know
Speaker 1: actually if this idea is going to work very well.
Speaker 1: Those thirty five Washington Post colleagues who are testing them,
Speaker 1: none of them got an exposure notification from this app
Speaker 1: over a candy period. Now that could be for many reasons.
Speaker 1: It could be like they were just being really good
Speaker 1: at social distancing. It could mean that not many people
Speaker 1: around them we're using it, or it could mean that
Speaker 1: there's some problems with the idea that the phones can
Speaker 1: do this. But I don't think we were going to
Speaker 1: really figure that out. Is if a lot more people
Speaker 1: try it, And that's one of the interesting parts. Experts
Speaker 1: estimate that up to sixty of a population needs to
Speaker 1: be using these exposure apps for them to be effective.
Speaker 1: So in Virginia that means they need about five million
Speaker 1: people to download it. But in its first week's covid
Speaker 1: wise got three hundred and eighty thousand downloads, so very
Speaker 1: far short of that number needed. But there's other things
Speaker 1: that are kind of become a problem with is this
Speaker 1: is in Virginia just by itself, but there's no big
Speaker 1: national system. So let's say you travel between states or
Speaker 1: just whatever, you come into contact with somebody else, maybe
Speaker 1: using a different app. It's not this COVID wise one,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not all going to work so seamlessly.
Speaker 1: America's app exposure unification strategy suffers from stame of the
Speaker 1: some of the same problems as the rest of our
Speaker 1: coronavirus strategy, and that it's very local based, very state based,
Speaker 1: so as it's set up right now in the United States,
Speaker 1: every state health department would have to make their own
Speaker 1: version of one of these apps. The Feds have not
Speaker 1: expressed any interest, even though in other countries it is
Speaker 1: kind of the national government that's been working on these
Speaker 1: kinds of apps. The good news is that about twenty
Speaker 1: states now have said that they're working on these kinds
Speaker 1: of apps. After Virginia, three more joined it, so we
Speaker 1: already have four out there in the wild. And there
Speaker 1: has been announced an effort that would make these apps
Speaker 1: sort of communicate with each other a little bit so
Speaker 1: that you could cross state borders with it. So that's
Speaker 1: a work in progress, but not there yet. How does
Speaker 1: the bluetooth aspect of it work, Because you said it
Speaker 1: doesn't really necessarily spy on you. The data is anonymized
Speaker 1: as well, So tell us how that works, just so
Speaker 1: we can have peace of mind. With it at least
Speaker 1: this is kind of a fascinating idea that they use
Speaker 1: with this technology. So, first of all, Bluetooth most people
Speaker 1: might have associate with like headphones or like music play
Speaker 1: in your car, and that was really the reason this
Speaker 1: wireless technology was invented for these sort of very short
Speaker 1: range transmissions. Well, turns out that Bluetooth also has the
Speaker 1: capability of being able to roughly tell how far away
Speaker 1: something is based on the strength of the signal. So
Speaker 1: these engineers at Apple and Google got together and they said, hey,
Speaker 1: what if we got made phones listened out for other
Speaker 1: phones that they're nearby, and record something about the ones
Speaker 1: that got six ft are closer. From Morgan fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: to develop this system that they pushed out into recent
Speaker 1: updates to Android and to iOS. So if you've updated
Speaker 1: your phone software was somely you've got it on your
Speaker 1: phone already that they're able to in the background send
Speaker 1: out these little chirps a couple times a second that
Speaker 1: just a very short anonymous codes. And the way it
Speaker 1: works basically is you know when you're near someone for
Speaker 1: sturing the period of time, your phone makes note of
Speaker 1: that anonymous code of the phone that you're in the year,
Speaker 1: and then if that person later has a coronavirus test
Speaker 1: and and has the disease, their health department can give
Speaker 1: them a code to enter into their app, and that
Speaker 1: will signal the system to let everybody else know who's
Speaker 1: come into contact with that patient's code that they should
Speaker 1: go get tested for coronavirus as well. So throughout this
Speaker 1: process the government doesn't know where you were or even
Speaker 1: when or how you might have contracted the disease, and
Speaker 1: in fact, the government doesn't like that about it. They
Speaker 1: wish they had more information, and so that's been one
Speaker 1: of the things that's made it so slow. But at
Speaker 1: no point can they really use it to track you
Speaker 1: as the interesting part to me, well, as you said,
Speaker 1: the biggest concern with these things is trust, and at
Speaker 1: least it's a little reassuring that they built these apps
Speaker 1: with that in mind, that your privacy is not really
Speaker 1: at risk, and the risk overall to anybody downloading these
Speaker 1: is pretty low. The biggest problem, it seems like, is
Speaker 1: the widespread adoption. You need so many people to buy
Speaker 1: into this and then put themselves into the apple if
Speaker 1: they do have a positive test that other people can know.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's really going to be the biggest problem
Speaker 1: with all of these, but at least for now, you know,
Speaker 1: at least we have some type of working framework for this,
Speaker 1: and if we do get into these apps, it could
Speaker 1: be a benefit for a lot of people. The biggest
Speaker 1: risk to you as an individual is you can get
Speaker 1: a false positive because maybe sometimes the bluetooth signals don't
Speaker 1: work super well and maybe you're picking up on the
Speaker 1: guy who lives next door who you've not actually been
Speaker 1: in contact with. So that is one thing that could happen.
Speaker 1: Worst case scenario there you take a COVID test you
Speaker 1: didn't need, Okay. The other risk really is that you
Speaker 1: could get false negatives, which means that you think you're
Speaker 1: safe even if you've not been. And so definitely anybody
Speaker 1: installs one of these should take it with a grain
Speaker 1: of salt. Is not magic. It won't shield you from
Speaker 1: the virus, but it could give you some important information
Speaker 1: to help you know when you might need to take
Speaker 1: a test, and I think that's worth trying for everyone.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Fowler tech calumnists at the way Shington Post, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for joining us. You bet, I'm Oscar
Speaker 1: Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort
Speaker 1: today's big news stories. You can check me out on
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