Sue Halpern writing in The New Yorker asks whether Americans will allow the government to track them via their phones, in order to beat back a deadly pandemic.
She writes that Caroline Buckee, a top epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, has devoted her professional life to studying malaria and other infectious diseases. As news of a novel coronavirus emerged from China, Buckee realized that her area of expertise—how infectious diseases evolve as they move through vulnerable populations—would be valuable to health-care workers and elected officials as the virus spread across the globe. “The methods and the tools are the same, and epidemiological models are easily adapted,” Buckee told me. “But, for many of us, like me, we work with endemic pathogens. covid-19 is new. There is so much we don’t know.” Since the most urgent imperative was to “flatten the curve” of infections, it was crucial to know where public-health strategies like stay-at-home orders were working and where they were not. Buckee quickly assembled a consortium of infectious-disease researchers to make the data accessible to policymakers—data that they did not yet have.
At just about the same time, Ian Allen, a former marine and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, cold-called Harvard’s School of Public Health and asked if there was anything that his new company, Camber Systems, could do to help with the pandemic. Soon afterward, Allen was connected with Buckee, the associate director of the School of Public Health’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. Buckee had created the covid-19 Mobility Data Network, a network of epidemiologists from universities around the world, to try to track the efficacy of social-distancing measures. Allen agreed to provide Buckee with the software to query and scrub data collected by tech companies and use it to track the coronavirus’s spread without violating Americans’ privacy. “I wasn’t really expecting ever to hear back, assuming that Harvard, of all places, would have all the resources they’d ever need,” Allen told me, while standing in a field in rural Virginia as his son shot at tin cans with a BB gun. (Like many parents, Allen has been homeschooling his children during the pandemic; this was geometry class.) “Caroline asked me if we could help aggregate location data. Just aggregating the data and anonymizing it in the right way to protect privacy would take some of the burden off of her.” Allen reached out to a handful of data firms, including Unacast, Kochava, and X-Mode. All agreed to provide their data for free.
Camber Systems, of which Allen is the C.E.O., is a year-old startup that, among other things, hopes to offer federal, state, and local government agencies ways to use commercially harvested location data to improve their operations without violating privacy laws. Shortly before the pandemic, Allen and his business partner, Navin Vembar, a mathematician who served as the chief technology officer of the General Services Administration, were searching for potential clients, talking with officials in Madison, Wisconsin, about using location data to shore up tourism and distribute the city’s public resources equitably. Assisting Buckee’s covid-19 Mobility Data Network was the kind of project they envisioned when they launched their company with Hangar, a venture-capital firm that funds companies that use technology in the public interest.