It looks like our friendly overlords in big tech are here to save us once again. That’s right, the benevolent masters over at Google and Apple are now looking to to use your location data to piece together just how well everyone obeying the social distancing recommendations, and who has been exposed to the dreaded cerveza sickness. 

Not to worry, though Apple have confirmed that the data they gather isn’t tied to any Apple ID, so they supposedly won’t know what each individual person is up to. That’s right, they pinky promise they won’t collect any more data than necessary. Ah, I feel so relieved. In all seriousness though, if the government wants to know who is running around town too much, and who we are meeting (and they certainly do), not only will they find out, but they’ll probably find out in secret.

So how does this tool work? The contact-tracing tool that Apple and Google want to create here would have your smartphone log when you’ve come into close contact with other people. If one of those people report symptoms to a health authority, your phone receives an alert about the diagnosis. That’s right, it essentially exchanges contact information with everyone you meet. No big deal!

Apparently, this solution makes uses of bluetooth signals. Of course, bluetooth signals can also travel through physical barriers, so the tool might well deliver contact notifications falsely, say for example if there’s a wall between two devices. That means you could get a notification about being exposed to the coronavirus when, in reality, you and the other person are in two separate apartments. No problem, it’s not like many people live in apartments. 

Here’s the problem (well, one of them. We’re already misleading ourselves by over-consuming realtime data without any kind of context or sense of scale. Look at how badly we confused ourselves with the daily infection data. Not to mention, the tests themselves are still not completely accurate. This is going to be another, case of ever more panic because of big dumb data.

Moreover, you don’t fight pandemics with an opt-in smartphone update. An app can’t trace which surfaces you touch or who touched them before you. An app won’t make you sneeze into your elbow. An app won’t trace whether you had washed your hands before touching those lemons at the supermarket, nor if the person prior to you had done so. Life is not as absolute as a software developer might hope. The real world cannot easily be reduced down to simple events like some video game. At the moment, we see lots of simulations, visualizations and modeling of the virus spread, but as sophisticated as these might seem, they are crude guestimations, approximations, blunt renderings of the infinitely complex thing we call reality. The real world is not some video game where each interaction can be neatly translated into a point on a score board. 

Technology exists on the level of the abstract; it doesn’t have as much of a bearing on the physical world as you might hope. Apps and data collection will not save the world, but they will destroy privacy, facilitate surveillance and enable an un-erasable life history on everyone. We are told that the contact tracing solutions are going to be opt-in. There is some debate about how many people might opt in to the tracking, but this is a moot point. If enough people don’t opt in (60% required), rest assured that they’ll simply fill in the gaps in adoption with other means. You can do the same thing with 4G carrier signal, or with all the other surveillance that your phone conducts 24/7. 

For instance, you can incorporate the gyroscopic and accelerometer data from your phone. Used together, your phone can store your location and movements even if your phone is in flight mode. That data is transmitted to the cloud when you reenable your data connection. So if you thin