Before the pandemic, the plan would have seemed like something ripped from a distant dystopian future in which the human race fully surrenders to Big Tech. On the April 10 online document, the logos of Google and Apple sat atop a description of the companies' joint plan to enable America's cellphones to keep track of everyone with whom their owners come into contact.
Who would sign on to such extensive surveillance? Much of the world already has. In South Korea, health officials use apps and video cameras to track down people who came into contact with COVID-19 patients before symptoms appeared. China, Singapore and Australia already have phone-based contact-tracing in place, and much of Europe is following suit. The UK's National Health Service, for instance, has endorsed a scheme that's undergoing a pilot test, and Germany's government is close behind.
But Americans are not quite like the rest of the world. Perhaps more than the population of any other country in the world, Americans tend to resist letting the government keep a close eye on them, even under life-and-death circumstances. In the case of contact tracing, that reluctance looks like an immovable obstacle. "In a fast-moving pandemic, protecting individuals' rights to privacy limits the ability of the government to protect the health of the population," says Eric Campbell, a researcher with the University of Colorado's medical campus specializing in health policy and bioethics.
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