I’ve been reading about contact tracers to figure how they work in practice. 🔎

From the articles I shared earlier in the evening, it looks like traditional contacting tracing mostly focuses on close contact – people a person has been within 6 foot for more than 15 minutes. Somebody on an airplane sitting in an assigned seat is a common example. Of possibly a house mate, somebody next to somebody else in a cubicle. Or a family member or intimate partner where they kiss or have sex or eat around the kitchen table.

More recently, with Caronavirus they’ve tried to trace more casual contacts but that gets hard really fast. Unless you the person your sitting next to on the city bus is a friend or a regular rider, you don’t know their name most likely. Or the person next to you in the check out line at the grocery store. And with everyone wearing face masks these days, security cameras are probably not much better at identifying people – facial recognition is unreliable enough when people aren’t wearing masks.

While I would expect many but probably not all stores would be willing to hand over reasonable amounts of security videos to public health departments, I bet it would be harder to get data like rewards cards data or even harder to get credit card usage.

For one, while I’m sure corporate headquarters have the rewards card info they may be hesitant to hand it over the government without a court order. Why let trade secrets out? Likewise, credit card companies probably are limited by law on how much information they can provide without a supeona. Again, credit cards data is valuable for marketing. And it’s not like every one uses a credit card to pay.

Even if you pull those records it could lead to too much data to be useful. In a 15 minute window, there might be hundreds that come and go from a grocery store with few people making close contact. Same could be said about buses – while bus passes could be tracked, a bus over an hour or two could have hundreds of people boarding and leaving.

High technology solutions sound nice but would you run such an app on your phone? I know I don’t have a lot of free space on my phone. What if you left your phone home? Many older people don’t have smart phones or carry them non stop. I don’t want the government tracking my every move, whether or not I attend a political rally or meeting, where I am every minute of the day.

Contact tracing seems like a good solution if Coronavirus was less infectious, required significant close contact and got everybody very sick quickly from it. But I’m not sure it would work well in America with people and businesses seeking privacy and out lives that frequently involving and passing strangers we might never see again.