Re: <nettime> Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health efforts?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

There is an interview in today's Corriere della Sera describing the
contact-tracing app that three Italian firms are developing for the
Department of Civil Protection:

https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_marzo_18/coronavirus-pronta-app-italiana-tracciare-contagi-cosi-possiamo-fermare-l-epidemia-c6c31218-6919-11ea-913c-55c2df06d574.shtml

The coordinator of this project is a medical administrator. He only
describes the broad outlines:

"It is a downloadable application on the mobile that allows, once the
positives have been identified, to reconstruct all their movements in the
previous weeks and to send a message to those with whom they have come in
contact to signal that they are at risk and must start self quarantine.
Doing so stops the spread of the virus. It is the same approach
experimented in South Korea, Singapore and partly in China, which has
proved very effective."

Presumably the app connects the individual's phone account and all its
associated location info to a purpose-built database, while at the same
giving the state the legal authority to use the data. Some accuracy gain in
the geolocation is also claimed. The aim is to use the app after
full-population lockdown is over, in order to halt the formation of new
clusters. This would allow for the epidemiological management of individual
mobility over the 18th-month period before a vaccine can be rolled out
massively. Mobility-management enforced by the police, if you did not
gather that already. An additional function allows for real-time
identification of emerging outbreaks:

""The app also has a 'clinical diary' for early detection, early detection
of infections. A section where individual users can anonymously record any
symptoms. The data thus collected allow us to predict if there are areas in
which the infection is spreading. Today, however, we only test people who
get worse: it means that we detect cases when they are now at least ten
days old. And so they have already infected others. Knowing if today in
Milan, for example, there is a sudden increase in people with a fever means
being able to intervene immediately with quarantine and preventive
isolation."

In South Korea where this kind of app was first developed, all the
information is made public, apparently to promote public trust in
government (???). People have made map interfaces to visualize the data.
Check it out:

https://coronamap.site

Red dot means the infected person was at the marked location sometime
between now and 24 hrs ago; yellow, from 1 to 4 days ago; green, more than
4 days ago - so no problem with that particular bar/restaurant/shopping
center/apartment complex ...

The South Korean approach is described in an article in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y

As David Lyons pointed out long ago, most new surveillance functions are
welcomed by the public, because of the security gains they offer. So in
South Korea:

"The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals’
movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym
University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored,
published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported
the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore,
most “preferred the public good to individual rights”, says Ju. He and his
colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how
much personal information the public supports disclosing."

If applied in the Western societies - as the Italians intend - this would
represent a fundamental change in the social contract. Combine it with
unlimited state intervention in the economy and the mobilization of
corporations and the military for production, health care and border
closure, and you're looking at social changes far beyond what happened
after 9/11.

It has been obvious for years that Anthropocene conditions were going to
force a transformation of the state, in order to deal with new problems
emerging at the level of the population, and ultimately, of the species.
Just as the neoliberal globalization paradigm is now clearly over, it seems
that political liberalism itself will now undergo a sea-change in terms of
the theoretical inviolability of individual rights. In the face of this,
there seem to be two broad options for civil society response:

-- Publicly refuse any infringement of previously existing rights, while
privately maintaining the psycho-philosophical stance of the autonomous
individual; or

-- Participate critically in the elaboration of new population- and
species-level norms for the being-in-common of a fully cybernetic society
-- but on the ethical basis of what kind of "general intellect"????

If anyone is looking for a core problem in philosophy or political science
to work on over the next few months, maybe this is it. I reckon the
questions above are not exclusive alternatives. Instead they begin to mark
out the contested/consensual space in which the new social paradigm will
emerge. No ready-made answer on the basis of preexisting concepts and
attitudes can fill that space.

thoughtfully yours, Brian




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: