How Contact Tracing Apps Sold Out Your Privacy

From public health to private hell.

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Guest Post By “Take Back Our Tech”

When we think of a "backdoor", most people imagine an elite team of hackers huddled up in a dark room waiting for confirmation to infiltrate their target’s phones.

While this might be how elite-level spyware like NSO's Pegasus is activated against politicians, activists, or journalists, what about everyday people? 

We, the people, must worry about a separate brand of ‘backdoor’ driven by the government, public health departments, and big technology. 

The bio-surveillance state has made it clear that we have little control over our technology, and our devices can be used against us. In this two-part series we’ll look at how contact tracing apps took hold in the United States.

In part 1, we’ll look at the technicals of contact tracing, and whether the science was even valid, and in part 2, we’ll see how big tech forced these apps on millions of people. 

The Race to Trace Ya'

The saga began in 2020, during the height of the COVID PLANdemic. Like a script, most states in the United States began spending millions of dollars on contact tracing programs.

This was supported by a $10.25B cooperative agreement by the CDC and through $11B of new funding from the Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration.

What's contact tracing? Its a 'public health' practice used to identify and notify people who have been exposed to someone with an infectious disease. 

—CA Dept. Public Health

During the COVID era, public health surveillance took place in various forms. From teams conducting door-to-door surveys to widespread phone outreach campaigns, clinical testing sites, home testing programs, and state-sponsored mobile applications, the scope of these efforts was unprecedented. 

The Asymptomatic Transmission Question

Image: Shutterstick / Elenabsl

Was contact tracing even appropriate to track COVID-19? Did it accurately identify people at risk for exposure to COVID-19? Although the scientific community went along with contact tracing, retrospective studies challenge the core assumptions driving these programs. 

Most notably, a comprehensive Wuhan study examined 1,174 close contacts of 300 asymptomatic positive cases and found no evidence of transmission. This crucial data point raised serious questions about the scientific basis for extensive contact tracing of asymptomatic individuals, who comprised a significant portion of positive cases. 

Diagnostic Protocol Flaws

The diagnostic approach also deviated from traditional medical best practices. 

Instead of relying on comprehensive clinical assessments, the system largely reduced diagnosis to a single data point: the RT-PCR test result. This oversimplification bypassed crucial medical oversight and ignored the complex nature of disease diagnosis. Additionally, the RT-PCR testing protocols themselves faced significant technical criticisms. The key issues with RT-PCR implementation include:

• Arbitrary cycle threshold selection (magnifying the sample to extreme thresholds)

• Lack of calibration against samples showing active viral impact on living cells 

• Insufficient correlation between positive results and actual infectiousness

• Absence of symptom consideration in result interpretations

You can read more about the flawed science here. 

Useless Software Based on Flawed Science 

Big tech played a huge part in making the contact tracing scam happen. On April 10th, 2020 Google & Apple jointly announced a COVID Exposure Notifications Solution, referred to as GAEN (Google Apple Exposure Notifications). It utilized Bluetooth Low Energy technology to detect whether individuals had been around other people who had tested positive for COVID-19.

How GAEN Works

This exposure notification framework was rolled out to Apple phones and Android phones running Google Play Services starting in May 2020. The service needed to be enabled by the user and would broadcast a 'Rolling Proximity Identifier (RPI)' using Bluetooth Low Energy, as it collected the RPIs from surrounding phones every 4 minutes.

At the end of the day, RPIs of all positive contacts in the state would be downloaded - typically from the local Public Health Agency - and the user would be notified if they were a part of a 'proximity eve’ or close to anyone with a positive case. 

A proximity event occurs when two phones spend 15 minutes or more a distance of 2m or less apart. The distance was calculated by 'attenuation', which was the transmission power of the Bluetooth packet minus the received power.

Bluetooth Low Energy can travel up to 10 or 20 meters, with a max range of up to 100 meters. The assumption was that received power would drop off with distance.

Public health authorities would specify an attenuation range in their GAEN configuration, defining what constitutes a proximity event.

This attenuation was supposed to be a (noisy) proxy for distance. Even Google admits its not a very good proxy for distance, yet it was the key metric used.

An independent study has found that the Bluetooth Low energy is incapable of judging proximity. Other studies have found that attenuation does not correlate well with distance, and instead is unpredictable. Shown on the graph below is the attenuation as the distance between two phones increases.

Proximity events could also be influenced by the range of attenuation for the proximity event, defined by the public health authority. When using Italy's attenuation rules, researchers found that predicting a proximity event had a 50/50 chance - as good as flipping a coin.

Despite all of this, public health authorities pushed forward with this solution. It seems there was no interest or effort in understanding how it worked.

Public health apps using GAEN were developed and adopted by 40% of the United States.

Throughout the world, 50 countries developed contract tracing applications using their own exposure notification framework or by creating one in collaboration with big tech companies.

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Expectation vs. Reality

Regulatory health bodies expected everyone to use these apps to help ‘stop the spread’. In reality, getting anyone to care proved difficult. 

How many people actually used contact tracing apps? 

The uptake must have been embarrassing, as most US-based contact tracing apps have been removed completely from the Google Play Store. The data on uptake and downloads is hard to find and not reported by state health departments, even when requested.

Neither the Apple app store nor Google Play store report the exact number of downloads. Apple reports nothing and Google Play reports brackets such as 50K-100K or 100K to 500K bracket.

Even with public money and data - there's no transparency.

There were a few states that reported contact tracing data publicly. Washington’s Department of Health reported 2.62 million downloads at the end of 2021 out of a population of 7.7 million (2022). But, of course, they, too, scrapped the program.

Contact Tracing Fails

In 2022, we saw contact tracing programs get junked like a pair of old shoes. 31 states suspended contact tracing or shifted operations locally, 12 states moved to work with partners, 2 states outsourced contracts to companies, and only 5 states kept their programs.

Internationally, we find that many of these contract-tracing projects are being abandoned, with 12 out of the 28 EU member states discontinuing their contract-tracing apps.

And that makes sense given that people have rejected these contact tracing apps, with only 9.3% adoption of residents in the 13 most populous countries with government-endorsed apps.

Even Australia, with its shockingly authoritarian COVID measures and 7 million app downloads (Australians were told lockdowns would end sooner), disbanded its contact tracing app in August of 2022. Hilariously, the app found only two unique positive COVID cases despite 40% of the population using the app.

Can Contact Tracing Be Forced?

In part 2, we’ll see how public health departments and big tech forced their useless creations on unsuspecting users. It’s amazing how quickly big tech companies and public health authorities will cover up gigantic wastes of taxpayer money, scrapping their programs and apps as quickly as they came. 

Don't let this happen again! Be prepared for whatever public health officials and unelected global organizations try to pull in the future by staying in control of your communications, data, and location with a privacy phone like Above Phone. 

If you want to know if your current smartphone has been compromised, register for Above's free webinar on November 19th: Hidden Signs Your Phone is Compromised. 

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