Out of fear of coronavirus, a small liberal arts school in Michigan (Albion College) has implemented a contact-tracing app called Aura with the purpose of helping the university in handling any potential coronavirus outbreaks on campus. While the hope of the app is to limit the spread of the virus, many vulnerabilities within the app have raised questions about how secure students’ private information like real time location tracking data and test results is.
Albion College has made the use of Aura completely mandatory on their campus as students are expected to use the app or face suspension from the school. Given the difficulties and danger that the virus has caused for many other schools and universities including Penn State, I believe that Albion College has good intentions at heart with the implementation of this app. With that being said, the amount of location data and personal medical data that Aura is storing is extremely risky, and the potential repercussions of data leaks would be disastrous. Overall, I would say this app crosses the line from necessary into intrusive because of the quantity of personal data that it collects.
I do not think the implementation of an app like Aura would go well at a school like Penn State, primarily because of the number of students at the university. While Albion College has only 1,500 students, Penn State Main Campus has nearly 40,000 students. Additionally, the lack of internal testing that was done on the app would make me feel very concerned if Penn State were to force us to use it.
I do not believe that privacy of data is more valuable than the safety of the general public when it comes to the virus, but I don’t think that the way Aura was built or implemented at Albion College will make that strong of a difference in the spread of the virus. There are other methods for contact tracing, such as using Bluetooth signals, that are much less intrusive and more privacy friendly. Additionally, the lack of testing that went into Aura means that the app was not ready to be used when it comes to private health information like virus test results.
The implementation of Aura at Albion College will likely serve as a lesson for future apps that also aim to help with contact-tracing and preventing the spread of the virus, showing that much more testing and oversight is needed to effectively build an app of this kind.
On the topic of apps related to COVID-19, I have embedded my video here where I discuss more in depth the data model for modeling an individual patient's risk level for COVID-19 that I started last week, building a Physical Diagram along with the Conceptual Diagram. This data model could be potentially applied to building an algorithm to calculate an individual's risk level for COVID-19 given all of the attributes discussed in the video. I hope you enjoy!
Conceptual Diagram:
Physical Diagram:
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