As we emerge from the coronavirus lockdown, those of us who still have a workplace may not recognize it. Businesses, eager to limit liability for employees and customers, are considering a variety of emerging technologies for limiting COVID-19 spread.
These technologies can be loosely divided into two types: one based on cellphone technologies and the other using wearable devices such as electronic bracelets. Both approaches focus on maintaining social distancing, nominally 6 feet between workers.
Most workers will have little choice whether to participate in their employer’s risk mitigation. But it’s essential that both employees and employers understand the technologies in use, their effectiveness at reducing risk of infection and the risks they may pose to the privacy and well-being of all involved.
Social-distancing technologies are designed to warn workers when they get too close to each other, typically relying on communications that can travel only short distances.
Perhaps the most promising communication technology for social distancing is ultra-wideband, which enables precise distance measurements between devices. A more common medium is Bluetooth Low Energy, which is used for headphones and portable speakers, though it may produce less consistently accurate distance information.
Some of the solutions do attempt to safeguard privacy.
Finally, sound itself can be used to determine distance to other people. The advantage is that it respects wall and door boundaries just like the coronavirus.
Contact-tracing apps, which are used to alert people when they’ve been exposed to an infected person, loosely adhere to a common design. They include approaches focusing on privacy and security, or precise distance measurements using sound outside of the human hearing range.
Wearables, devices that a person can wear like a bracelet or a ring, can also be used for social distancing. Popular workplace wearables can buzz or otherwise alert employees when they get within 6 feet of each other. Other devices monitor health indicators such as pulse and body temperature.
Although some modeling suggests that even crude social distancing can help spread out infection rates over time, digital contact tracing faces serious challenges of adoption – in order for an infectious contact to be recorded, both parties must be using the technology.
Employers can already legally read employee emails, monitor calls and record video of employees. What additional risk does contact tracing present?
The location data used by some contact-tracing solutions can be intensely personal. It can identify with whom workers eat lunch or even what they purchased for lunch. It can identify what fraction of the workday is spent by the water cooler, and even how often and for how long the bathroom is used. Without explicit safeguards, employees are forced to choose between keeping their jobs and maintaining their privacy.
Fortunately, some of the solutions do attempt to safeguard privacy in a variety of ways.
It is important that data shared with the employer – or any third party – should be anonymous and not tied to personal information. Indeed, several of the cellphone-based solutions only share randomly generated data that is useful only for contact-tracing apps that tell the phone’s owner about potential exposures. Some of the wearables do not use a central repository, instead deleting data after 14 days.
Some of the technologies prevent employers from accessing employee contact history. In these approaches, only employees who have been near an infected individual are alerted.
Employers are naturally anxious to get a broad picture of worker health, but the greater insight necessarily intrudes on privacy. I believe the ideal scenario is where the worker – and no one else – knows only that he has been exposed to the virus recently, not when, where or by whom.
Ari Trachtenberg is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, systems engineering and computer science at Boston University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
