Gov. Gina M. Raimondo says she’s been thrilled with the early response to the state’s Crush COVID RI phone app, despite the specter of Big Brother it raises for some.
More than 35,000 people have downloaded the app, which is designed to help the state with contact tracing during the pandemic.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island has raised a valid concern about what protections workers would have if an employer tried to force them to utilize the app.
But some other concerns raised by the ACLU and others about the app changing into something potentially more troubling than the current iteration are unnecessarily alarmist.
To be sure, government infection-mapping in other countries has raised significant privacy concerns – not to mention potentially damaging consequences for businesses.
The Washington Post in March reported on the South Korean government’s publishing of the movements of people before they were diagnosed with the virus, by using GPS phone tracking, credit card records and other means that would raise serious concerns in this country.
But that is a far cry from what the state’s app can do, which is track where a user has been. This seems like a more efficient method of beginning contact-tracing efforts than the logs or notebooks Gov. Raimondo previously asked residents to keep.
And anyone concerned about privacy violations can disable the GPS function or choose not to share it with the state. As long as those options exist, the biggest concern about the new app may be whether enough people will consistently use it for it to be effective on a broad scale.