Washington (AFP)

Digital or manual? Bluetooth or GPS? Centralized or decentralized? The American States are divided on the method to be adopted to develop at best the "tracing" of the human contacts and to follow at best the progression of the coronavirus.

For some American governors, smartphone technology is the only way to intensify efforts to identify people likely to spread the disease and retrace their routes.

But his critics have expressed fears for the privacy of Americans.

"We do not yet know if any of these technologies will work, but we do know that we are currently lacking many of the protections necessary to guard against abuse or excess," said Neema Singh Guliani of the powerful association of ACLU civil rights.

This week, the American giants Apple and Google have made available to health authorities around the world their solution to build a contact tracking application via Bluetooth, the system that allows smartphones and other electronic devices to communicate at close range.

Twenty-two countries on five continents have requested access to the programming interface, but only three American states.

Instead, several of them launched their own application without Google and Apple, as in Europe, where competing tracking systems are being developed.

The application "Crush Covid" from the small state of Rhode Island was developed by a company based in India, and uses location detection by GPS and notifications on the user's phone.

The Utah Healthy Together app employs a similar system while promising to delete location and Bluetooth data after 30 days.

But if incompatible apps are used, it could be much more difficult to track people if they move from state to state.

To be effective, surveillance of digital contacts must concern at least 40 to 60% of the population, according to some researchers.

- Army of tracers -

But in Utah, a month after its availability, the "Healthy Together" application had only been downloaded by 45,000 people, less than 2% of the population of this western state of the country.

To gain broad participation, "governments and application providers must ensure that strong privacy protections are in place," said Lauren Sarkesian of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

However, according to a survey by the PSB institute, two thirds of Americans were suspicious of their government in the management of their personal data during pandemic times.

Some large American states have opted for "old-fashioned" contact tracking by hiring people to call those at risk of infection, a laborious process that presents its own challenges.

According to initial estimates, 100,000 new employees, "tracers", would be needed for the entire American territory.

More than a dozen public health experts have asked Congress, in an open letter, to release $ 12 billion to dramatically increase the number of these contact tracers to at least 180,000.

There are an estimated 17,000 in New York and at least 10,000 in California. Massachusetts has taken the lead in hiring 1,000 people and similar efforts are underway in Maryland, Virginia, Indiana and other states.

But for Albert Gidari, privacy consultant at Stanford University, digital systems will necessarily be faster and more efficient than manual search, slow and imprecise, which relies on people's memories and which omits interactions. that a patient would have had with strangers.

And - he pointed out at a conference - avoiding technology means that "you disclose personal information to a foreigner who works for the government without having the slightest idea of ​​who will see it, how it is stored or how much long they will be kept. "

Some experts even claim that the virus is so contagious that it could require a massive effort: combining digital and human tracking.

© 2020 AFP