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"The sensitive privacy and trust issues that human contact tracers face are likely to be amplified in the technology realm." (Photo: Roger Brown Photography/Shutterstock.com)
Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight Covid-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the principal coronavirus health needs.
We have said from the outset that location-based contact tracing was untenable, but that the concept of "proximity tracking"--in which Bluetooth signals emitted by phones are used to notify people who may have been exposed--seemed both more plausible and less of a threat to privacy. Indeed, a number of serious institutions began working on this concept early in the pandemic, most notably Apple and Google, which have already implemented a version of the concept in their mobile operating systems.
Some of the problems with tech-assisted contact tracing have been apparent from the beginning, such as the social dimensions of the challenge. Smartphone ownership is not evenly distributed by income, race, or age, threatening to create disparate effects from such schemes. And even the most comprehensive, all-seeing contact tracing system is of little use without social and medical systems in place to help those who may have the virus--including access to medical care, testing, and support for those who are quarantined. Those systems are all inadequate in the United States today.
Other problems with technology-assisted contact tracing have become more apparent as the pandemic has played out. Specifically, such tracing appears to be squeezed from two directions. On the one hand, a tool shouldn't pick up every fleeting encounter and swamp users with too many meaningless notifications. On the other, if it is confined to reporting sustained close contacts of the kind that are most likely to result in transmission, the tool is not likely to improve upon old-fashioned human contact tracing. Those are the kinds of contacts that people are likely to remember. And those memories, relayed to human contact tracers, are more likely to identify a patient's significant past exposures than an automated app that can't determine, for example, whether two people were separated by glass or a wall.
The first problem--the danger of generating far too many "exposure notifications"--is considerable. As one commentator put it, "actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have." Swamping users with false notifications would be useless and annoying at best, and seriously disruptive and counterproductive at worst. Ultimately, people will stop taking the notifications seriously, or just uninstall the app.
That problem is made worse by the fact that Covid-19 is a more difficult disease to trace than many. As a group of prominent epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota explained in a report on contact tracing, contact tracing is less effective when:
These factors increase the risk of generating too many exposure notifications to be useful. Serious technical challenges with using smartphones for contact tracing also increase that risk. One of the biggest questions has always been how to use Bluetooth to judge which encounters are worthy of being recorded as potential transmission events. Judgments have to be made about how close a person needs to be, and for how much time, to meet the warning threshold. That becomes even trickier since Bluetooth can't reliably measure distances. The strength of a Bluetooth signal varies not only with distance, but also from phone to phone, and from owner to owner. The frequency at which Bluetooth operates (2.4 GHz) is one that is easily absorbed by water, including the water in the human body, which means that signal strength can vary significantly depending upon whether a person has their phone in their front or back pocket, and how much that person weighs.
Complicating matters is the fact that existing contact-tracing apps are being thrown together very quickly. Google and Apple moved from concept to a finalized product in less than 12 weeks. They should be commended for stepping up in an emergency, but we shouldn't expect it to work well anytime soon. As is clear to any experienced software developer, their product is basically an early prototype that's being pushed into production. In a normal world, they would be testing their app on groups of hundreds and then thousands of people in cities and a variety of other real-world situations. Through no fault of Apple and Google, there simply hasn't been the opportunity to do the kind of engineering development and refinement that a project like this really needs.
And of course, what is true of software developed by Apple and Google is even more true of apps developed in a rush by state governments like North Dakota and Rhode Island, or other nations like South Korea. South Korea has been lauded for its high-tech coronavirus response. But the quarantine app the country has been using put people's names, locations, and other private information at risk by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices.
While effective technology-assisted contact tracing apps must avoid generating too many exposure notifications, they must also establish that they can improve upon or significantly augment old-fashioned human contact tracing.
Epidemiologists emphasize that contact tracing has always been a tricky and sensitive job. Getting people to trust any official enough to open up about their potentially privacy-sensitive whereabouts and contacts is a skill--one that requires "training and development of a specialized skill set" as well as "consideration of local contexts, communities, and cultures."
That is especially true since those who are identified as having been exposed to the coronavirus are asked to self-quarantine for two weeks--putting much or all of their life on hold, and possibly risking the loss of a job or income, necessitating the finding of new caregivers for dependents, and imposing various other costs. That's something that a friend will be reluctant to impose upon another friend by giving their name--especially where no social support is provided to those asked to self-quarantine. As the Minnesota report warned, "If people perceive the economic, social, or other costs of compliance with contact tracing are greater than its value, it won't be successful."
There are many reasons to doubt that these tricky issues can be navigated better through technology. As report co-author Michael Osterholm put it, "Having been in public health for 45 years, and having cut my teeth in surveillance in many different ways--I don't think most people would comply. If I got notifications that I'd been exposed to [someone] with COVID, would I self-isolate for 14 days at home, because I got a text on my phone?"
The sensitive privacy and trust issues that human contact tracers face are likely to be amplified in the technology realm. People who are reluctant to tell contact tracers where they've been are likely to be even more reluctant to let an app carry such information. By building tools with very strong, cleverly constructed privacy protections, Apple, Google, and others have created the best possible chance of engendering trust in those apps, but those protections still have gaps. People who refuse to wear a mask are unlikely to deliberately install tracking software on their phone, whatever privacy assurances they are given. Nor are many members of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities for whom "trust in the authorities is non-existent."
Some experts have estimated that at least 60 percent of a population would have to run an app for it to become effective. Others think apps can be modestly helpful even with much smaller adoption rates. But aside from trust issues, the number of people willing to participate seems to have gone down since the first months of the outbreak, as "social distancing fatigue" has set in and public panic over the virus has given way to a more measured caution (and in too many cases, an abandonment of all caution whatsoever).
The bottom line is that there are too few reasons to think that apps will prove more helpful than human memories elicited by experienced contact tracers. The promise of exposure notifications lies in the space between the large pool of incidental contacts that people have, and the smaller number of significant contacts that they remember. The apps promise to track contacts that are close and sustained enough to pose a serious risk of exposure yet beyond the subject's memory. For most people, that space may simply not be large enough to be useful.
Unsurprisingly, given these problems, the states and countries that have experimented with using technology-assisted contact tracing have not met with much success. The use of technology by China and some other Asian countries has received a lot of attention, but as the Minnesota epidemiologists point out, "we don't know exactly what methods were used, how many cases were involved, and what the estimated impact was in reducing transmission since other mitigation strategies were employed at the same time" in those countries.
That lack of measurement is true throughout the world. An MIT survey of global digital contact-tracing efforts found 43 countries in some stage of offering a product. Ten of those countries are relying on the privacy-preserving Apple/Google protocol, with the rest a jumble of different architectures and policies. It may not be quite true, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on June 24, that "No country in the world has a working contact tracing app"--Germany has launched an app that has been downloaded over 14 million times so far, and India claims 131 million downloads for its app and 900,000 users who have been contacted and told to self-isolate. But we don't know if those numbers represent a high enough proportion of the populations to actually have an impact on slowing the disease in Germany and India, let alone in countries with lower adoption rates. We also don't know how effective it is to simply tell people to self-isolate, in the absence of social support for them to do so.
It's also worth noting that in some countries such as China and India, digital tracking is imposed in authoritarian ways that would cause most people who value civil liberties to recoil.
In the U.S., a few states have attempted to launch apps, including Utah, where things went so badly that one program was shut down within 72 hours of its launch, and another one had not led to any contract tracing a month after its launch. An app in North and South Dakota ran into trouble quickly when it was revealed to be sharing data with a private location-data company. Overall, state efforts so far have been plagued by "technical glitches and a general lack of interest by their residents." A survey by Business Insider found that only three states planned to use the Apple/Google technology. Others had not decided, but 17 states reported that they had no plans to use smartphone-based contact tracing at all.
Those who have worked on privacy-preserving exposure notification apps should be commended for stepping up. They have dedicated their skills toward trying to save lives and restore people's freedom, and they did a very good job creating a privacy-preserving approach that was not only the most likely to be trusted and effective, but also the least likely to permanently change our world for the worse.
Nevertheless, it does not appear to be working out. "A lot of this is just distraction," Osterholm concluded of all the talk over digital contact tracing. "I just don't see any of this materializing." Given what we know about the technology, we are inclined to agree.
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Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight Covid-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the principal coronavirus health needs.
We have said from the outset that location-based contact tracing was untenable, but that the concept of "proximity tracking"--in which Bluetooth signals emitted by phones are used to notify people who may have been exposed--seemed both more plausible and less of a threat to privacy. Indeed, a number of serious institutions began working on this concept early in the pandemic, most notably Apple and Google, which have already implemented a version of the concept in their mobile operating systems.
Some of the problems with tech-assisted contact tracing have been apparent from the beginning, such as the social dimensions of the challenge. Smartphone ownership is not evenly distributed by income, race, or age, threatening to create disparate effects from such schemes. And even the most comprehensive, all-seeing contact tracing system is of little use without social and medical systems in place to help those who may have the virus--including access to medical care, testing, and support for those who are quarantined. Those systems are all inadequate in the United States today.
Other problems with technology-assisted contact tracing have become more apparent as the pandemic has played out. Specifically, such tracing appears to be squeezed from two directions. On the one hand, a tool shouldn't pick up every fleeting encounter and swamp users with too many meaningless notifications. On the other, if it is confined to reporting sustained close contacts of the kind that are most likely to result in transmission, the tool is not likely to improve upon old-fashioned human contact tracing. Those are the kinds of contacts that people are likely to remember. And those memories, relayed to human contact tracers, are more likely to identify a patient's significant past exposures than an automated app that can't determine, for example, whether two people were separated by glass or a wall.
The first problem--the danger of generating far too many "exposure notifications"--is considerable. As one commentator put it, "actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have." Swamping users with false notifications would be useless and annoying at best, and seriously disruptive and counterproductive at worst. Ultimately, people will stop taking the notifications seriously, or just uninstall the app.
That problem is made worse by the fact that Covid-19 is a more difficult disease to trace than many. As a group of prominent epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota explained in a report on contact tracing, contact tracing is less effective when:
These factors increase the risk of generating too many exposure notifications to be useful. Serious technical challenges with using smartphones for contact tracing also increase that risk. One of the biggest questions has always been how to use Bluetooth to judge which encounters are worthy of being recorded as potential transmission events. Judgments have to be made about how close a person needs to be, and for how much time, to meet the warning threshold. That becomes even trickier since Bluetooth can't reliably measure distances. The strength of a Bluetooth signal varies not only with distance, but also from phone to phone, and from owner to owner. The frequency at which Bluetooth operates (2.4 GHz) is one that is easily absorbed by water, including the water in the human body, which means that signal strength can vary significantly depending upon whether a person has their phone in their front or back pocket, and how much that person weighs.
Complicating matters is the fact that existing contact-tracing apps are being thrown together very quickly. Google and Apple moved from concept to a finalized product in less than 12 weeks. They should be commended for stepping up in an emergency, but we shouldn't expect it to work well anytime soon. As is clear to any experienced software developer, their product is basically an early prototype that's being pushed into production. In a normal world, they would be testing their app on groups of hundreds and then thousands of people in cities and a variety of other real-world situations. Through no fault of Apple and Google, there simply hasn't been the opportunity to do the kind of engineering development and refinement that a project like this really needs.
And of course, what is true of software developed by Apple and Google is even more true of apps developed in a rush by state governments like North Dakota and Rhode Island, or other nations like South Korea. South Korea has been lauded for its high-tech coronavirus response. But the quarantine app the country has been using put people's names, locations, and other private information at risk by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices.
While effective technology-assisted contact tracing apps must avoid generating too many exposure notifications, they must also establish that they can improve upon or significantly augment old-fashioned human contact tracing.
Epidemiologists emphasize that contact tracing has always been a tricky and sensitive job. Getting people to trust any official enough to open up about their potentially privacy-sensitive whereabouts and contacts is a skill--one that requires "training and development of a specialized skill set" as well as "consideration of local contexts, communities, and cultures."
That is especially true since those who are identified as having been exposed to the coronavirus are asked to self-quarantine for two weeks--putting much or all of their life on hold, and possibly risking the loss of a job or income, necessitating the finding of new caregivers for dependents, and imposing various other costs. That's something that a friend will be reluctant to impose upon another friend by giving their name--especially where no social support is provided to those asked to self-quarantine. As the Minnesota report warned, "If people perceive the economic, social, or other costs of compliance with contact tracing are greater than its value, it won't be successful."
There are many reasons to doubt that these tricky issues can be navigated better through technology. As report co-author Michael Osterholm put it, "Having been in public health for 45 years, and having cut my teeth in surveillance in many different ways--I don't think most people would comply. If I got notifications that I'd been exposed to [someone] with COVID, would I self-isolate for 14 days at home, because I got a text on my phone?"
The sensitive privacy and trust issues that human contact tracers face are likely to be amplified in the technology realm. People who are reluctant to tell contact tracers where they've been are likely to be even more reluctant to let an app carry such information. By building tools with very strong, cleverly constructed privacy protections, Apple, Google, and others have created the best possible chance of engendering trust in those apps, but those protections still have gaps. People who refuse to wear a mask are unlikely to deliberately install tracking software on their phone, whatever privacy assurances they are given. Nor are many members of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities for whom "trust in the authorities is non-existent."
Some experts have estimated that at least 60 percent of a population would have to run an app for it to become effective. Others think apps can be modestly helpful even with much smaller adoption rates. But aside from trust issues, the number of people willing to participate seems to have gone down since the first months of the outbreak, as "social distancing fatigue" has set in and public panic over the virus has given way to a more measured caution (and in too many cases, an abandonment of all caution whatsoever).
The bottom line is that there are too few reasons to think that apps will prove more helpful than human memories elicited by experienced contact tracers. The promise of exposure notifications lies in the space between the large pool of incidental contacts that people have, and the smaller number of significant contacts that they remember. The apps promise to track contacts that are close and sustained enough to pose a serious risk of exposure yet beyond the subject's memory. For most people, that space may simply not be large enough to be useful.
Unsurprisingly, given these problems, the states and countries that have experimented with using technology-assisted contact tracing have not met with much success. The use of technology by China and some other Asian countries has received a lot of attention, but as the Minnesota epidemiologists point out, "we don't know exactly what methods were used, how many cases were involved, and what the estimated impact was in reducing transmission since other mitigation strategies were employed at the same time" in those countries.
That lack of measurement is true throughout the world. An MIT survey of global digital contact-tracing efforts found 43 countries in some stage of offering a product. Ten of those countries are relying on the privacy-preserving Apple/Google protocol, with the rest a jumble of different architectures and policies. It may not be quite true, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on June 24, that "No country in the world has a working contact tracing app"--Germany has launched an app that has been downloaded over 14 million times so far, and India claims 131 million downloads for its app and 900,000 users who have been contacted and told to self-isolate. But we don't know if those numbers represent a high enough proportion of the populations to actually have an impact on slowing the disease in Germany and India, let alone in countries with lower adoption rates. We also don't know how effective it is to simply tell people to self-isolate, in the absence of social support for them to do so.
It's also worth noting that in some countries such as China and India, digital tracking is imposed in authoritarian ways that would cause most people who value civil liberties to recoil.
In the U.S., a few states have attempted to launch apps, including Utah, where things went so badly that one program was shut down within 72 hours of its launch, and another one had not led to any contract tracing a month after its launch. An app in North and South Dakota ran into trouble quickly when it was revealed to be sharing data with a private location-data company. Overall, state efforts so far have been plagued by "technical glitches and a general lack of interest by their residents." A survey by Business Insider found that only three states planned to use the Apple/Google technology. Others had not decided, but 17 states reported that they had no plans to use smartphone-based contact tracing at all.
Those who have worked on privacy-preserving exposure notification apps should be commended for stepping up. They have dedicated their skills toward trying to save lives and restore people's freedom, and they did a very good job creating a privacy-preserving approach that was not only the most likely to be trusted and effective, but also the least likely to permanently change our world for the worse.
Nevertheless, it does not appear to be working out. "A lot of this is just distraction," Osterholm concluded of all the talk over digital contact tracing. "I just don't see any of this materializing." Given what we know about the technology, we are inclined to agree.
Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight Covid-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the principal coronavirus health needs.
We have said from the outset that location-based contact tracing was untenable, but that the concept of "proximity tracking"--in which Bluetooth signals emitted by phones are used to notify people who may have been exposed--seemed both more plausible and less of a threat to privacy. Indeed, a number of serious institutions began working on this concept early in the pandemic, most notably Apple and Google, which have already implemented a version of the concept in their mobile operating systems.
Some of the problems with tech-assisted contact tracing have been apparent from the beginning, such as the social dimensions of the challenge. Smartphone ownership is not evenly distributed by income, race, or age, threatening to create disparate effects from such schemes. And even the most comprehensive, all-seeing contact tracing system is of little use without social and medical systems in place to help those who may have the virus--including access to medical care, testing, and support for those who are quarantined. Those systems are all inadequate in the United States today.
Other problems with technology-assisted contact tracing have become more apparent as the pandemic has played out. Specifically, such tracing appears to be squeezed from two directions. On the one hand, a tool shouldn't pick up every fleeting encounter and swamp users with too many meaningless notifications. On the other, if it is confined to reporting sustained close contacts of the kind that are most likely to result in transmission, the tool is not likely to improve upon old-fashioned human contact tracing. Those are the kinds of contacts that people are likely to remember. And those memories, relayed to human contact tracers, are more likely to identify a patient's significant past exposures than an automated app that can't determine, for example, whether two people were separated by glass or a wall.
The first problem--the danger of generating far too many "exposure notifications"--is considerable. As one commentator put it, "actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have." Swamping users with false notifications would be useless and annoying at best, and seriously disruptive and counterproductive at worst. Ultimately, people will stop taking the notifications seriously, or just uninstall the app.
That problem is made worse by the fact that Covid-19 is a more difficult disease to trace than many. As a group of prominent epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota explained in a report on contact tracing, contact tracing is less effective when:
These factors increase the risk of generating too many exposure notifications to be useful. Serious technical challenges with using smartphones for contact tracing also increase that risk. One of the biggest questions has always been how to use Bluetooth to judge which encounters are worthy of being recorded as potential transmission events. Judgments have to be made about how close a person needs to be, and for how much time, to meet the warning threshold. That becomes even trickier since Bluetooth can't reliably measure distances. The strength of a Bluetooth signal varies not only with distance, but also from phone to phone, and from owner to owner. The frequency at which Bluetooth operates (2.4 GHz) is one that is easily absorbed by water, including the water in the human body, which means that signal strength can vary significantly depending upon whether a person has their phone in their front or back pocket, and how much that person weighs.
Complicating matters is the fact that existing contact-tracing apps are being thrown together very quickly. Google and Apple moved from concept to a finalized product in less than 12 weeks. They should be commended for stepping up in an emergency, but we shouldn't expect it to work well anytime soon. As is clear to any experienced software developer, their product is basically an early prototype that's being pushed into production. In a normal world, they would be testing their app on groups of hundreds and then thousands of people in cities and a variety of other real-world situations. Through no fault of Apple and Google, there simply hasn't been the opportunity to do the kind of engineering development and refinement that a project like this really needs.
And of course, what is true of software developed by Apple and Google is even more true of apps developed in a rush by state governments like North Dakota and Rhode Island, or other nations like South Korea. South Korea has been lauded for its high-tech coronavirus response. But the quarantine app the country has been using put people's names, locations, and other private information at risk by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices.
While effective technology-assisted contact tracing apps must avoid generating too many exposure notifications, they must also establish that they can improve upon or significantly augment old-fashioned human contact tracing.
Epidemiologists emphasize that contact tracing has always been a tricky and sensitive job. Getting people to trust any official enough to open up about their potentially privacy-sensitive whereabouts and contacts is a skill--one that requires "training and development of a specialized skill set" as well as "consideration of local contexts, communities, and cultures."
That is especially true since those who are identified as having been exposed to the coronavirus are asked to self-quarantine for two weeks--putting much or all of their life on hold, and possibly risking the loss of a job or income, necessitating the finding of new caregivers for dependents, and imposing various other costs. That's something that a friend will be reluctant to impose upon another friend by giving their name--especially where no social support is provided to those asked to self-quarantine. As the Minnesota report warned, "If people perceive the economic, social, or other costs of compliance with contact tracing are greater than its value, it won't be successful."
There are many reasons to doubt that these tricky issues can be navigated better through technology. As report co-author Michael Osterholm put it, "Having been in public health for 45 years, and having cut my teeth in surveillance in many different ways--I don't think most people would comply. If I got notifications that I'd been exposed to [someone] with COVID, would I self-isolate for 14 days at home, because I got a text on my phone?"
The sensitive privacy and trust issues that human contact tracers face are likely to be amplified in the technology realm. People who are reluctant to tell contact tracers where they've been are likely to be even more reluctant to let an app carry such information. By building tools with very strong, cleverly constructed privacy protections, Apple, Google, and others have created the best possible chance of engendering trust in those apps, but those protections still have gaps. People who refuse to wear a mask are unlikely to deliberately install tracking software on their phone, whatever privacy assurances they are given. Nor are many members of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities for whom "trust in the authorities is non-existent."
Some experts have estimated that at least 60 percent of a population would have to run an app for it to become effective. Others think apps can be modestly helpful even with much smaller adoption rates. But aside from trust issues, the number of people willing to participate seems to have gone down since the first months of the outbreak, as "social distancing fatigue" has set in and public panic over the virus has given way to a more measured caution (and in too many cases, an abandonment of all caution whatsoever).
The bottom line is that there are too few reasons to think that apps will prove more helpful than human memories elicited by experienced contact tracers. The promise of exposure notifications lies in the space between the large pool of incidental contacts that people have, and the smaller number of significant contacts that they remember. The apps promise to track contacts that are close and sustained enough to pose a serious risk of exposure yet beyond the subject's memory. For most people, that space may simply not be large enough to be useful.
Unsurprisingly, given these problems, the states and countries that have experimented with using technology-assisted contact tracing have not met with much success. The use of technology by China and some other Asian countries has received a lot of attention, but as the Minnesota epidemiologists point out, "we don't know exactly what methods were used, how many cases were involved, and what the estimated impact was in reducing transmission since other mitigation strategies were employed at the same time" in those countries.
That lack of measurement is true throughout the world. An MIT survey of global digital contact-tracing efforts found 43 countries in some stage of offering a product. Ten of those countries are relying on the privacy-preserving Apple/Google protocol, with the rest a jumble of different architectures and policies. It may not be quite true, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on June 24, that "No country in the world has a working contact tracing app"--Germany has launched an app that has been downloaded over 14 million times so far, and India claims 131 million downloads for its app and 900,000 users who have been contacted and told to self-isolate. But we don't know if those numbers represent a high enough proportion of the populations to actually have an impact on slowing the disease in Germany and India, let alone in countries with lower adoption rates. We also don't know how effective it is to simply tell people to self-isolate, in the absence of social support for them to do so.
It's also worth noting that in some countries such as China and India, digital tracking is imposed in authoritarian ways that would cause most people who value civil liberties to recoil.
In the U.S., a few states have attempted to launch apps, including Utah, where things went so badly that one program was shut down within 72 hours of its launch, and another one had not led to any contract tracing a month after its launch. An app in North and South Dakota ran into trouble quickly when it was revealed to be sharing data with a private location-data company. Overall, state efforts so far have been plagued by "technical glitches and a general lack of interest by their residents." A survey by Business Insider found that only three states planned to use the Apple/Google technology. Others had not decided, but 17 states reported that they had no plans to use smartphone-based contact tracing at all.
Those who have worked on privacy-preserving exposure notification apps should be commended for stepping up. They have dedicated their skills toward trying to save lives and restore people's freedom, and they did a very good job creating a privacy-preserving approach that was not only the most likely to be trusted and effective, but also the least likely to permanently change our world for the worse.
Nevertheless, it does not appear to be working out. "A lot of this is just distraction," Osterholm concluded of all the talk over digital contact tracing. "I just don't see any of this materializing." Given what we know about the technology, we are inclined to agree.
"Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions," one activist said.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires triggered an air quality alert for New York City and Long Island on Sunday, activists with Climate Defiance disrupted a speech by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons.
The disruption came four days after reports emerged that Zeldin's EPA was set to repeal the 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It is this finding that has given the EPA the authority to regulate climate emissions under the Clean Air Act.
"We are in a climate crisis largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels," the first activist to disrupt the speech said, according to video footage shared by Climate Defiance. "And Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions."
Zeldin's speech took place at the Global Breakfast Forum, held at The Hamptons Synagogue.
"What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
Several of the young Jewish activists who disrupted the speech referenced their faith.
"The Torah commands us to be stewards of the Earth, not the oil industry," one activist said.
The audience largely responded with boos and jeers, and one attacked two of the activists with a chair, according to Climate Defiance video footage.
However, the Climate Defiance activists emphasized that Zeldin and the pro-fossil fuel Trump administration were the forces that would ultimately disrupt life and community in the Hamptons.
"History is going to remember you as a monster," one yelled out to Zeldin.
Another said: "Lee Zeldin, you have taken half of a million dollars from fossil fuels. What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
The disrupters also referenced Project 2025 and the broader Trump administration. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, Zeldin's EPA has achieved 57% of the Heritage Foundation road map's objectives.
"Lee Zeldin is carrying out the plans of Project 2025 and fossil fuels to a T," one said. "Your orange overlord does not care about any of you. All of you will be suffering from the rising seas and the worsening climate crisis."
A member of Extinction Rebellion NYC, who assisted with the protest, said in a statement: "Heritage has long been helmed by fossil fuel interests like Koch Industries, which has done some of the heaviest lifting to make sure nothing is done on climate change in the U.S. The majority of these wishes have been executed by Zeldin himself, and through Trump, who asked for $1 billion from oil companies in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago during his campaign. His Big, Beautiful Bill is a wish list directly penned in Project 2025. And when we hit 4°C of warming this century, we will know the true cost of these deadly practices."
Protesters also referenced the repeal of the endangerment finding, climate-fueled extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the smoke pollution clouding the region as Zeldin spoke.
"There is smoke in the air for another summer," one said. "This is only going to get worse and worse."
Both New York City Emergency Management and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Air Quality Health Advisories through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday as smoke poured into the region from Canadian wildfires. Air quality was listed as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and at 11:00 am Eastern Time on Sunday, New York City had the eighth worst air quality of any city on Earth.
The smoke recalled the thick orange haze that blanketed New York and other parts of the Northeast during the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season of 2023. The climate crisis makes wildfires more frequent and extreme.
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
"All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful," one organizer said.
Tens of thousands of people in more than 225 towns and cities across the U.S. came out on Saturday as part of the Families First National Day of Action to protest Trump administration and Republican policies that defund the safety net while funneling unprecedented amounts of cash toward immigration enforcement.
The day of action came around three weeks after the U.S. House passed and President Donald Trump signed a budget bill that would strip 17 million of Americans of their health insurance and 2 million of their food aid while making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history.
"Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we are just days away from the 60th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare at the end of this month. These policies represent a promise we made to each other: that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to take care of our families, from one generation to the next, should be supported," Ai-jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Common Dreams on Sunday.
"But a big ugly budget bill just passed," Poo continued, "that breaks that promise by making historic cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, by using our tax dollars to stoke fear and rip families apart simply due to their immigration status. This is not what families want, and those who passed it must know that the vast majority of us want our tax dollars to go to healthcare and food, a safety net for families, supporting public funds for families, health, food, and the economic security for all of us, not billionaires."
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country."
Families First is a coalition made up of over 75 organizations including Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn, Community Change Action, MomsRising, Planned Parenthood, People's Action Institute, Family Values @ Work, Families Over Billionaires, Fair Share America, Working Families Power, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; and the National Education Association.
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country, hosting over 225 events where we peacefully protested, to show the intergenerational face of those of us prepared to hold the ones who passed this bill accountable every day, and to take action. From spelling out the word 'familia' on the beach in California, taking a Medicaid Motorcade through the state of Indiana, to a rally in D.C. on the National Mall at the seat of power," Poo said.
Here are some highlights from Saturday's day of action.
On the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol building, organizers capped a 60-hour vigil opposing Medicaid cuts with a rally at 12:00 pm ET.
Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change, spoke at the rally on the important role that Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) played in her life.
"I'm here both as an advocate and organizer and as someone who has lived the realities we're fighting to change, as a person who has been directly shaped by the programs that are currently under attack," Wells said. "I was a Medicaid kid, I was a SNAP kid. These programs kept me and my mom and my brother healthy, alive, and moving forward when we had nothing to fall back on."
Families gathered in Newark's Military Park to protest the budget cuts.
"Congress is helping the rich get richer while cutting healthcare, education, and support for working families," New Jersey Citizen Action wrote on social media. "We're making sure everyone knows who's responsible. We're fighting for a country where every child is cared for, no one goes hungry, and we all have access to the healthcare we need to live."
The Indiana Rural Summit planned a "Motorcade for Medicaid" to drive by rural hospitals across the state.
"We're using the event as a touchpoint to demonstrate the importance and value of local hospitals that are at risk of closing because they have historically relied on Medicaid for financial viability," organizer Michelle Higgs told The Republic. "We want to amplify the voices of those who are impacted, whether they're disabled, have a chronic illness, or are elderly."
Union members took to the streets from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington.
SEIU members marched in cities including Tampa; Orlando; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Allentown, Pennsylvania; New York City, Boston; and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, hundreds of union workers protested in downtown Seattle.
In Connecticut, SEIU members marched to the Brennan Rogers Magnet School, which closed due to a state funding shortfall.
"Cleaners, healthcare workers, construction workers, we are the ones that make this country run and we ask for no special privileges in return. but we are under attack," Ciro Gutierrez, a 32BJSEIU Connecticut commercial member, said.
Reflecting on the day of action, Poo concluded: "All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful. When we share our stories, we break through. When we stand side by side—from small towns to big cities—we can't be ignored. And we won't be divided."