The effectiveness of contact tracing apps is limited. Over ninety percent of the people in Canada who have died from the coronavirus are over sixty. They are the group who is less likely to carry and use a smartphone. Those that do, are more likely to have trouble working with apps. This causes concern about the government push to adopt this type of technology.

The Minneapolis Public Safety Commissioner suggested that protesters upset over the killing of George Floyd were going to be tracked down through a process described as a contact tracing app. It seems that the data collected by the smartphone app can pass information along that would help police identify users. It’s doubtful that many of these people would be over sixty but it shed some light on why the government encourages the public to download it. Although participants are told their privacy will be protected, it doesn’t mean it is.

In Canada, the recipients of the data could be violating your privacy according to the Charter of Rights. Then again, in Alberta, the UCP government will be going to court to defend Bill 1, which has also been accused of violating the charter of rights.

Amnesty International points out:

Not only can government intervention and the suspension of regular policies and practices create new injustices, but they can also often make the crisis itself disproportionately worse for some. And some governments use crises as an opportunity to overreach in their actions, using the crisis as justification for human rights violations.

There are a lot of apps that track people now. Two years ago Google was taken to court in a class action suit. It isn’t just Google. There are over five-thousand apps that track users locations. It isn’t only apps. There are a lot of cameras throughout cities, and facial recognition technology. Although reportedly to be accurate, it makes mistakes too.

This type of tracking happens every day. Regardless of whether it is a privacy violation, most people have become accustomed to understand it happens with or without their consent. To a lot of people it doesn’t matter. However, it becomes a bigger concern for those who get charged $25,000 for protesting, even though the right to protest is written into the charter of rights. This could very likely happen with the UCP’s Bill 1. Authorities could use the contact tracking app to help identify those who attended these protests.

An article in the New York Times, ‘Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy’ says, “Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We are coming into an era where we are being controlled by the government through the devices we own.

Nigel Smart, a Belgian professor who has been a key figure in pushing Europe towards decentralized contact tracing protocols says, “Making people think that contact tracing could also be used for political or law enforcement may make people less likely to engage with contact tracing during an epidemic. Which will then lead to unnecessary loss of life.”

Yes, you could even be made to feel guilty by not letting the government track you. Blaming the further loss of life on your selfishness by refusing to share your exact location at all times is an excellent motivator.

If you give into the guilt, there is more to worry about then having your privacy invaded. With so many millions of people expected to download these apps, it makes them a prime target for hackers.

One such example happened just recently in Canada. On the same day that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a voluntary nationwide contact tracing app, hackers compiled a ransomware app known as CryCryptor. The Android app encrypts important user files on a device and gives instructions on how to undo the encryption by paying the hackers.

Luckily, the security research team at ESET figured out the scheme. While CryCryptor may not be too prevalent a threat at the moment, that doesn’t mean ransomware of this type won’t be a big problem. You should learn about how this was done so you can avoid it happening to you.

Contact tracing apps are of little value to the majority of people who could benefit by them, and more valuable to other services and organizations other than the people who download and use them.