8 ms·

Can we stop Covid-19 using Bluetooth?

48 points by grafelic 7y ago

fudged71 7y ago
This is a fantastic idea for retrospective infectious disease contact tracking. I hope this concept is picked up by WHO/government or at least put on a local trial. Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs?
- tastroder 7y ago
  > Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs? Because embedded hardware like phones usually only persistently store the information for which an actual use case exists. "recent BT device IDs" amounts to quite a bit of information (that is occasionally pretty useless in the case of unknown devices) and would require frequent scanning when you are on the move with little practical purpose outside the tracking space. There's enough approaches to create these profiles from the IT security and ad space but I consider myself lucky in living in a jurisdiction where such tracking is likely considered illegal.
- sunemai 7y ago
  I've heard that everybody is connected with a surprisingly low number of intermediate steps. Maybe now would be a good time to try that out;-) So, if you know anybody...
aaron695 7y ago
Unless you love fascism this is a train wreck of awful. It's also full of incorrect statements. This is not true. The medical community does not agree with this for many diseases and many levels of "non-negligible virus threat" > Every responsible human being should be interested in knowing if he or she presents a non-negligible virus threat to family, friends, colleagues and thus – ultimately – society in general.
- brookish 7y ago
  Wanted to chime in. We currently OEM a product to Purell (GOJO) on exactly this concept. Albeit additional hardware is required, we have been extremely successful locating staff and monitoring of dispensers with BLE. Our goal has been to prevent the spread of infection in hospitals by monitoring hand hygiene compliance. ‘https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO-Expands-PURELL-SMARTLINK-Portfolio-with-Individual-Monitoring-Solution‘ https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO-Ex...
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  I read the article and largely agree with aaron965 on this. There's a number of problems with saying "every responsible human being should be interested in knowing ...": 1) does knowing make you legally or criminally responsible for spreading the virus, as in the case of early AIDS patients? 2) Being exposed doesn't mean you'll get sick. So what to do next with the info you met somebody who is in the database? 3) In most Western countries, citizens can afford health care. However, in the USA and other developing nations, affording a hospital is not an option. So what's the point? The article presents an interesting idea, but separating policy and technology concerns when it comes to healthcare is really not a great idea. For now I think the traditional methods of dealing with seasonal flu make the most sense: offer information in the press and make affordable shots available.
nexuist 7y ago
Not sure OP is the same as the GitHub developer, but I want to applaud whoever took the time to write out this idea in a professional yet understandable manner. I had fun reading the paper. Unfortunately this idea is (mostly) dead in the water if it sticks with its current implementation. The reason is that both Android and iOS now engage in MAC address randomization specifically to prevent being tracked by their unique IDs. This "feature" was previously commercialized by stores and private surveillance to track people moving around in a city or indoor building. Fixing this is not impossible. Instead of Bluetooth tracking, the app could simply just record your location every poll update and save it locally. There is no invasion of privacy if the location file is never uploaded to the cloud. When someone tests positive, they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously) and every device could cross check its location history with the infected person's. Technology is likely not the barrier here. Notifying and training medical personnel to effectively use the app is, and getting the general public to "buy in" will cost an absolute fortune (in advertising dollars) for little to no return. This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract lots of people. How do you solve that?
- jackweirdy 7y ago
  I’m not sure if Bluetooth MAC randomisation is different, but on iOS WiFi MAC randomisation only happens when location services are disabled: https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-mac-address-randomization-feature-works-and-when-it-doesnt/ https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-ma...
- thanksforfish 7y ago
  > they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously) Anonymity is going to be hard, even with traditional methods, but I don't think a person's location history can ever be anonymous. Especially when presented with timestamps and spanning days. People generally spend a lot of time, or at least their night, in their home. > This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract lots of people. How do you solve that? Bake it into an existing app that already has the network, I.E. Facebook.
jamesgeck0 7y ago
This is basically just a more invasive StreetPass, as seen on Nintendo 3DS.
viztor 7y ago
You can't. The Chinese Government already deployed Health Code, which pulls data from cell towers to check for cross paths with confirmed or suspected patients, and shows on screen as green, yellow or red colored QR code. To have this Bluetooth idea effective, you need to have sufficiently numbers of installation, and which can be insanely difficult if it weren't pushed by big corps or the government
- georgeam 7y ago
  I agree -- I would say the government should recognize the utility of the idea and request an emergency technical team from both Apple and Google to join up in a public-health emergency response consortium (to ensure interoperability) and brainstorm this idea. And Microsoft too, if they are still making windows phones.
  - tastroder 7y ago
    I'm sorry but are you literally asking governments to cooperate with Apple and Google to backdoor all of our devices or do so and bully the population into submitting their data? There's a point where we need to talk about trade-offs between tracking potential disease contacts and what this does to our society. China isn't supposed to be a role model in this regard people.
anonu 7y ago
I have another app idea. Quite a bit less sophisticated than what's proposed in the article. But still technically challenging: it's called FaceWatch. You use the accelerometers in a smartwatch to detect a hand getting closer to the face. If a threshold is breached an alarm is raised on your phone. The pavlovian response is to avoid touching your face and potentially spreading diseases from you hands. Downsides: You would need two smart watches. You would need to code an "eating mode".
- yunusabd 7y ago
  Not exactly what you describe, but a similar idea that uses your computer's webcam: https://donottouchyourface.com/ https://donottouchyourface.com/
- tailspin2019 7y ago
  I've written such an app, which was originally designed for Eczema sufferers to stop touching/scratching their face. I am about to release a beta version (free) aimed at reducing face touching for the Coronavirus. Would you mind if I used your proposed app name "FaceWatch"?
  - anonu 7y ago
    It's yours!
    - tailspin2019 7y ago
      Great, thank you. I'll comment back here with any updates. The app is very simplistic but I thought it might be worth getting it out there sooner rather than later in case it turns out to be useful to someone. Even if one person can help themselves learn to avoid touching their face and reduce the risk of COVID-19 it will have been worth doing.
tastroder 7y ago
I'm not sure how the section on GDPR actually answers the question it poses. "Any technological solution that tries to mimic the contact tracking performed by medical authorities will automatically break GDPR. Or will it really?" The former has little to do with the latter. If you track PII that's a potential GDPR issue, no matter how humanistic the purpose of your app is. NAL but from the legal side this use case does not seem any different from ad tracking companies doing the same thing. What is the fictional "rephrasing" of what this does supposed to change about the legal implications?
- sunemai 7y ago
  The point is that, currently, people are "tracked down" by medical authorities and put in quarantine. The AVICOT-APP concept is opposite: People would (should) like to know if they represents a danger to, say, their elderly parents, who may die if infected. Thus, there is no need for "the system" to be able to track or identify them at all. Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk.
  - tastroder 7y ago
    People are infected by contact with another infected person. There's a middle ground between "ineffective tracking by authorities through Excel sheets" (as seen in Germany) and giving up privacy and this proposal honestly can't be it. > Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk. In it's current iteration the protocol you propose contains this: "3. Regularly, e.g. every 6 hours, the AVICOT-APP checks the public “COVID-19 level 0” list on a WHO-organized AVICOT-SERVER. Entries in this are Bluetooth IDs of devices owned/used by officially diagnosed COVID-19 cases, who have given their consent to this publication. The list may be regionally organized, to limit mobile data requirements." If it is regionally organized this seems like a technical gimmick. If it has a larger scale, there remain privacy implications that would have to be carefully investigated, even with user consent - which dismisses it completely for any form of rapid deployment. Take the above, you either risk exposing Bluetooth hardware identifiers of those consenting known infected or, rely on me uploading my data to whoever it is that runs this. A better model for that part would be something like what HIBP does for password breaches but my point is that the proposal does not address this and since puts doubt on the "anonymity" part of the title. Even if it did, a large part of HIBP is that I can't control that HIBP has the information in the first place. The submission calls all this "sufficiently anonymous" and I would argue that there is no such thing, especially in this context. Or point 4. "The server then evaluates the data with an algorithm designed to estimate the infection risk." why? We have people that can do that, more effectively than a hastily written algorithm. This just adds unnecessary fluff. Point 5 is just redundant with point 4. I have no doubt that this is done with the best intentions in mind but the road to privacy hell is paved with those. We would be better off if we used our collective tech knowledge to build something that makes us more prepared and facilitates collaboration on the authority level for the next time we might need it.
sunemai 7y ago
Hi, I'm the developer behind https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation Thank you all for your valuable input - and sorry for the late reply: I posted under my own account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696) - but this thread initiated by a friend was the one to be picked up. I'll try to address some of the issues brought up under each comment later, but here is a few things to consider first: The MAC address randomization is a key issue here. For the "level 0 list", though, it might not be that much of a problem: If the app also keeps track of its own actual MAC address(es), then these are what would be published in the "level 0 list", along with the corresponding time-index. I'll update the GitHub description to take this into account, but please help me answer some of these questions first (or, better, write me an email, so you can contribute directly to the AVICOT/Documentation repo) : Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth? Is it coupled with the "location services" as suggested by jackweirdy below? Another important point is that of using location tracking instead, as suggested by c22. I had this exact scheme as the initial AVICOT concept, but abandoned it because even with one-way hashing of the coordinates of the space-time boxes, the locations (and thus identity) of the infected person can easily be calculated if the (hashed) "dangerous" space-time boxes are publicly available. One really good point of using space-time location boxes is, that you can assign an infection risk to being at the same location, say 3 hours later (e.g. use an exponential risk decay with some suitable half-life parameter). This is not possible with the Bluetooth IDs. But unless we solve the anonymity issue in some way, I think the Bluetooth way is easier.
- tastroder 7y ago
  > Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth? Doesn't matter. https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/article-p50.xml https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/arti... - note that this is seemingly aptly published in a conference on privacy. Yes, what you want to use bluetooth for would likely work but we've worked a decade or so to prevent it. You'll likely realize from my other comment that I dislike the general idea of this but honestly, I don't get the approach from a technical perspective. The idea is an app for smartphones, right? You have all kinds of sensors on those besides BT, e.g. WiFi, GPS. Comparing timestamped movement profiles would give you much better matching than approximating this stuff via BT environments, which these days at least theoretically are designed to explicitly prevent your use case and just seem to limit yourself artificially. The reason you dismissed geolocation is perfectly valid but that also applies to Bluetooth identifiers if you treat them as reliable indicators. If I get a (hashed or not) BT ID of infected persons, I can identify those - at the very least if their device is in my vicinity. And not only while this issue is active but afterwards. You would have to protect that data just as much, putting another ding in the "potential privacy implications" of the approach.
divbzero 7y ago
This idea reminds me of Apple’s approach to Find My offline device: [1] > Find My can help you locate a missing device — even if it’s offline and sleeping — by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be detected by Apple devices in use nearby. These devices then relay the detected location of your device to iCloud so you can locate it in the Find My app. It’s all anonymous and encrypted end-to-end so no one, including Apple, knows the identity of any reporting device. [1]: https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/
tastroder 7y ago
@sunemai: Just fyi, here in Germany a medical uni and some companies seem to currently do the geodata approach: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische-Hochschule-Hannover-und-Ubilabs-entwickeln-Corona-App-4680487.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische-Hochsch... https://www.geohealthapp.de/ https://www.geohealthapp.de/

48 points by grafelic 7y ago

This is a fantastic idea for retrospective infectious disease contact tracking. I hope this concept is picked up by WHO/government or at least put on a local trial. Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs?

tastroder 7y ago
> Why don't phones already keep a local log of recent Bluetooth device IDs? Because embedded hardware like phones usually only persistently store the information for which an actual use case exists. "recent BT device IDs" amounts to quite a bit of information (that is occasionally pretty useless in the case of unknown devices) and would require frequent scanning when you are on the move with little practical purpose outside the tracking space. There's enough approaches to create these profiles from the IT security and ad space but I consider myself lucky in living in a jurisdiction where such tracking is likely considered illegal.
sunemai 7y ago
I've heard that everybody is connected with a surprisingly low number of intermediate steps. Maybe now would be a good time to try that out;-) So, if you know anybody...

aaron695 7y ago

Unless you love fascism this is a train wreck of awful. It's also full of incorrect statements. This is not true. The medical community does not agree with this for many diseases and many levels of "non-negligible virus threat" > Every responsible human being should be interested in knowing if he or she presents a non-negligible virus threat to family, friends, colleagues and thus – ultimately – society in general.

brookish 7y ago
Wanted to chime in. We currently OEM a product to Purell (GOJO) on exactly this concept. Albeit additional hardware is required, we have been extremely successful locating staff and monitoring of dispensers with BLE. Our goal has been to prevent the spread of infection in hospitals by monitoring hand hygiene compliance. ‘https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO-Expands-PURELL-SMARTLINK-Portfolio-with-Individual-Monitoring-Solution‘ https://www.gojo.com/en/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2019/GOJO-Ex...
redis_mlc 7y ago
I read the article and largely agree with aaron965 on this. There's a number of problems with saying "every responsible human being should be interested in knowing ...": 1) does knowing make you legally or criminally responsible for spreading the virus, as in the case of early AIDS patients? 2) Being exposed doesn't mean you'll get sick. So what to do next with the info you met somebody who is in the database? 3) In most Western countries, citizens can afford health care. However, in the USA and other developing nations, affording a hospital is not an option. So what's the point? The article presents an interesting idea, but separating policy and technology concerns when it comes to healthcare is really not a great idea. For now I think the traditional methods of dealing with seasonal flu make the most sense: offer information in the press and make affordable shots available.

nexuist 7y ago

Not sure OP is the same as the GitHub developer, but I want to applaud whoever took the time to write out this idea in a professional yet understandable manner. I had fun reading the paper. Unfortunately this idea is (mostly) dead in the water if it sticks with its current implementation. The reason is that both Android and iOS now engage in MAC address randomization specifically to prevent being tracked by their unique IDs. This "feature" was previously commercialized by stores and private surveillance to track people moving around in a city or indoor building. Fixing this is not impossible. Instead of Bluetooth tracking, the app could simply just record your location every poll update and save it locally. There is no invasion of privacy if the location file is never uploaded to the cloud. When someone tests positive, they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously) and every device could cross check its location history with the infected person's. Technology is likely not the barrier here. Notifying and training medical personnel to effectively use the app is, and getting the general public to "buy in" will cost an absolute fortune (in advertising dollars) for little to no return. This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract lots of people. How do you solve that?

jackweirdy 7y ago
I’m not sure if Bluetooth MAC randomisation is different, but on iOS WiFi MAC randomisation only happens when location services are disabled: https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-mac-address-randomization-feature-works-and-when-it-doesnt/ https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-ma...
thanksforfish 7y ago
> they could just have their location file uploaded (anonymously) Anonymity is going to be hard, even with traditional methods, but I don't think a person's location history can ever be anonymous. Especially when presented with timestamps and spanning days. People generally spend a lot of time, or at least their night, in their home. > This is one of those network paradox problems where you need lots of people for the network to be useful, but the network has to be useful to attract lots of people. How do you solve that? Bake it into an existing app that already has the network, I.E. Facebook.

jamesgeck0 7y ago

This is basically just a more invasive StreetPass, as seen on Nintendo 3DS.

viztor 7y ago

You can't. The Chinese Government already deployed Health Code, which pulls data from cell towers to check for cross paths with confirmed or suspected patients, and shows on screen as green, yellow or red colored QR code. To have this Bluetooth idea effective, you need to have sufficiently numbers of installation, and which can be insanely difficult if it weren't pushed by big corps or the government

georgeam 7y ago
I agree -- I would say the government should recognize the utility of the idea and request an emergency technical team from both Apple and Google to join up in a public-health emergency response consortium (to ensure interoperability) and brainstorm this idea. And Microsoft too, if they are still making windows phones.
- tastroder 7y ago
  I'm sorry but are you literally asking governments to cooperate with Apple and Google to backdoor all of our devices or do so and bully the population into submitting their data? There's a point where we need to talk about trade-offs between tracking potential disease contacts and what this does to our society. China isn't supposed to be a role model in this regard people.

anonu 7y ago

I have another app idea. Quite a bit less sophisticated than what's proposed in the article. But still technically challenging: it's called FaceWatch. You use the accelerometers in a smartwatch to detect a hand getting closer to the face. If a threshold is breached an alarm is raised on your phone. The pavlovian response is to avoid touching your face and potentially spreading diseases from you hands. Downsides: You would need two smart watches. You would need to code an "eating mode".

yunusabd 7y ago
Not exactly what you describe, but a similar idea that uses your computer's webcam: https://donottouchyourface.com/ https://donottouchyourface.com/
tailspin2019 7y ago
I've written such an app, which was originally designed for Eczema sufferers to stop touching/scratching their face. I am about to release a beta version (free) aimed at reducing face touching for the Coronavirus. Would you mind if I used your proposed app name "FaceWatch"?
- anonu 7y ago
  It's yours!
  - tailspin2019 7y ago
    Great, thank you. I'll comment back here with any updates. The app is very simplistic but I thought it might be worth getting it out there sooner rather than later in case it turns out to be useful to someone. Even if one person can help themselves learn to avoid touching their face and reduce the risk of COVID-19 it will have been worth doing.

tastroder 7y ago

I'm not sure how the section on GDPR actually answers the question it poses. "Any technological solution that tries to mimic the contact tracking performed by medical authorities will automatically break GDPR. Or will it really?" The former has little to do with the latter. If you track PII that's a potential GDPR issue, no matter how humanistic the purpose of your app is. NAL but from the legal side this use case does not seem any different from ad tracking companies doing the same thing. What is the fictional "rephrasing" of what this does supposed to change about the legal implications?

sunemai 7y ago
The point is that, currently, people are "tracked down" by medical authorities and put in quarantine. The AVICOT-APP concept is opposite: People would (should) like to know if they represents a danger to, say, their elderly parents, who may die if infected. Thus, there is no need for "the system" to be able to track or identify them at all. Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk.
- tastroder 7y ago
  People are infected by contact with another infected person. There's a middle ground between "ineffective tracking by authorities through Excel sheets" (as seen in Germany) and giving up privacy and this proposal honestly can't be it. > Only you, the end user, will ever know if you are in high risk. In it's current iteration the protocol you propose contains this: "3. Regularly, e.g. every 6 hours, the AVICOT-APP checks the public “COVID-19 level 0” list on a WHO-organized AVICOT-SERVER. Entries in this are Bluetooth IDs of devices owned/used by officially diagnosed COVID-19 cases, who have given their consent to this publication. The list may be regionally organized, to limit mobile data requirements." If it is regionally organized this seems like a technical gimmick. If it has a larger scale, there remain privacy implications that would have to be carefully investigated, even with user consent - which dismisses it completely for any form of rapid deployment. Take the above, you either risk exposing Bluetooth hardware identifiers of those consenting known infected or, rely on me uploading my data to whoever it is that runs this. A better model for that part would be something like what HIBP does for password breaches but my point is that the proposal does not address this and since puts doubt on the "anonymity" part of the title. Even if it did, a large part of HIBP is that I can't control that HIBP has the information in the first place. The submission calls all this "sufficiently anonymous" and I would argue that there is no such thing, especially in this context. Or point 4. "The server then evaluates the data with an algorithm designed to estimate the infection risk." why? We have people that can do that, more effectively than a hastily written algorithm. This just adds unnecessary fluff. Point 5 is just redundant with point 4. I have no doubt that this is done with the best intentions in mind but the road to privacy hell is paved with those. We would be better off if we used our collective tech knowledge to build something that makes us more prepared and facilitates collaboration on the authority level for the next time we might need it.

sunemai 7y ago

Hi, I'm the developer behind https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation https://github.com/AVICOT-APP/Documentation Thank you all for your valuable input - and sorry for the late reply: I posted under my own account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22462696) - but this thread initiated by a friend was the one to be picked up. I'll try to address some of the issues brought up under each comment later, but here is a few things to consider first: The MAC address randomization is a key issue here. For the "level 0 list", though, it might not be that much of a problem: If the app also keeps track of its own actual MAC address(es), then these are what would be published in the "level 0 list", along with the corresponding time-index. I'll update the GitHub description to take this into account, but please help me answer some of these questions first (or, better, write me an email, so you can contribute directly to the AVICOT/Documentation repo) : Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth? Is it coupled with the "location services" as suggested by jackweirdy below? Another important point is that of using location tracking instead, as suggested by c22. I had this exact scheme as the initial AVICOT concept, but abandoned it because even with one-way hashing of the coordinates of the space-time boxes, the locations (and thus identity) of the infected person can easily be calculated if the (hashed) "dangerous" space-time boxes are publicly available. One really good point of using space-time location boxes is, that you can assign an infection risk to being at the same location, say 3 hours later (e.g. use an exponential risk decay with some suitable half-life parameter). This is not possible with the Bluetooth IDs. But unless we solve the anonymity issue in some way, I think the Bluetooth way is easier.

tastroder 7y ago
> Does the randomization happen at each new invocation of Bluetooth? Doesn't matter. https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/article-p50.xml https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2019/3/arti... - note that this is seemingly aptly published in a conference on privacy. Yes, what you want to use bluetooth for would likely work but we've worked a decade or so to prevent it. You'll likely realize from my other comment that I dislike the general idea of this but honestly, I don't get the approach from a technical perspective. The idea is an app for smartphones, right? You have all kinds of sensors on those besides BT, e.g. WiFi, GPS. Comparing timestamped movement profiles would give you much better matching than approximating this stuff via BT environments, which these days at least theoretically are designed to explicitly prevent your use case and just seem to limit yourself artificially. The reason you dismissed geolocation is perfectly valid but that also applies to Bluetooth identifiers if you treat them as reliable indicators. If I get a (hashed or not) BT ID of infected persons, I can identify those - at the very least if their device is in my vicinity. And not only while this issue is active but afterwards. You would have to protect that data just as much, putting another ding in the "potential privacy implications" of the approach.

divbzero 7y ago

This idea reminds me of Apple’s approach to Find My offline device: [1] > Find My can help you locate a missing device — even if it’s offline and sleeping — by sending out Bluetooth signals that can be detected by Apple devices in use nearby. These devices then relay the detected location of your device to iCloud so you can locate it in the Find My app. It’s all anonymous and encrypted end-to-end so no one, including Apple, knows the identity of any reporting device. [1]: https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/ https://www.apple.com/icloud/find-my/

tastroder 7y ago

@sunemai: Just fyi, here in Germany a medical uni and some companies seem to currently do the geodata approach: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische-Hochschule-Hannover-und-Ubilabs-entwickeln-Corona-App-4680487.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Medizinische-Hochsch... https://www.geohealthapp.de/ https://www.geohealthapp.de/