Apple-Google API rollout imminent

With help from Darius Tahir (@dariustahir), Alexandra S. Levine (@Ali_lev), Tim Starks (@timstarks) and Joanne Kenen (@joannekenen)

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Quick Fix

— Apple-Google API roll-out imminent: The tech titans have said their Bluetooth proximity tracking technology, which could be baked into contact tracing or exposure notification apps, will drop mid-May.

— Dems counter Republicans’ privacy bill: Their new measure aims to ensure that tech companies saying they’ll collect sensitive data only for public health purposes stick to that promise.

— FCC’s Pai to take hot seat on pandemic response: House E&C lawmakers are slated to question FCC chief Ajit Pai on a Tuesday teleconference forum.

eHealth tweet of the day: Keith W. Boone @motorcycle_guy “I think I’d pay some solid money to someone who developed an app that reported everyone trying to sell me a list of@HIMSS 2020 ‘attendee lists’ to the FTC for e-mail fraud.”

It’s FRIDAY at Morning eHealth. Which tech companies did you least expect to pivot to contact tracing? Let us know at [email protected]. Tweet us at @dariustahir, @ravindranize, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_eHealth.

Given the unprecedented public health challenge confronting regulatory affairs teams, the AgencyIQ leadership team has decided to pull research and analysis content concerning the virus and its regulatory implications in front of the paywall. It is available here: https://agencyiq.com/covid-19-resource-center/

Driving the Day

ANY DAY NOW — We’ve reached the middle of the month, and public health officials are eagerly awaiting Apple and Google’s API that could detect whether a person who’s tested positive for coronavirus has exposed other people based on the proximity of their devices.

... In the lead-up to the release, lawmakers are racing to promote contact tracing while also providing privacy safeguards. A group of four Democratic senators — including onetime presidential contender Elizabeth Warren — introduced a bill Thursday to allot $10 billion in funding for states and tribes to hire roughly 100,000 tracers and support staff. It would also require CDC to publish a strategy for contact tracing, including provisions for protecting data.

Data Privacy

PRIVACY WARS — Democrats’ bicameral counterproposal to Senate Republicans’ pandemic privacy bill would ban companies from using the health data they collect for discriminatory purposes, advertising, or misuse by other government agencies without a public health role, among other guardrails.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Mark Warner introduced the bill — dubbed the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act — along with Reps. Anna Eshoo, Jan Schakowsky, and Suzan DelBene.

Without policymakers’ “clear commitment” to improving health privacy laws, “creeping privacy violations could become the new status quo in health care and public health,” Warner said in a news release.

... As POLITICO’s Cristiano Lima reports, Republicans’ bill was introduced earlier this month without Democratic support, and aides said liberal lawmakers were unlikely to support the GOP proposal because it lacked strong enough privacy protections.

IN EUROPE: BIG TECH MUSCLES OUT GOVERNMENT — Apple and Google used their clout to lay out conditions for smartphone apps using their technology in Europe — at times constraining the public health groups they say they aim to help, POLITICO’s Mark Scott, Elisa Braun, Janosch Delcker and Vincent Manancourt report.

Conversations with more than 30 policymakers, data protection experts, independent computer scientists and tech engineers from across the EU and United States reveal that the companies strategically pushed back against government surveillance concerns and against politicians who used their opposition to Big Tech for political capital, they report.

“In often fraught discussions, officials weighed the need to protect privacy against the public health imperative of tackling a virus that, so far, has left almost 300,000 people dead worldwide,” the team writes. “Tech officials and privacy groups set aside longstanding feuds to figure out how to build COVID-19 apps, often condensing months of work into a few weeks. Politicians were left to decide whether to go it alone, often with tech offerings that left much to be desired — or team up with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names whose take-it-or-leave-it approach rubbed some the wrong way.”

... Germany, for instance, scrapped its own initial proposals in favor of the Google and Apple model. “The discussion among tech experts killed the credibility and trustworthiness of the [German-led] technology,” a high-ranking German official told POLITICO. “That’s why we decided to go with the different approach.”

Officials in Ireland, Italy and other countries took similar steps as they realized it was better to partner with Apple and Google, and with Germany, if the apps were to work across Europe.

Also across the Atlantic: European Commission wants apps to work for holiday travel — The Commission this week urged app developers to make sure their technology could exchange information even as people cross European borders for summer holidays, POLITICO’s Laurens Cerulus writes. “EU citizens must be able to receive alerts of a possible infection in a secure and protected way, wherever they are in the EU, and whatever app they are using,” the Commission said in a statement Wednesday.

THE PRIVACY PITFALLS OF PLEASURE — Our editor Joanne Kenen recently talked coronavirus antibody status and so-called immunity passports with Jarrett Zigon, an anthropologist who directs the University of Virginia Bioethics Program and the Center for Data Ethics and Justice. Zigon said he’s quite concerned that we’re rushing to surrender privacy in an emergency, much like he said we did after Sept. 11, 2001.

... He also pointed out that we’re used to checking that “agree to terms” box on our devices for apps connected to games, shopping or social media. “They are always tied into something that seems pleasurable,” he noted. “Social connection, or purchasing.”

VACCINE TIMELINE STRETCHES — The vaccine strategy chief of the European Medicines Agency says a coronavirus vaccine is still a year away from regulatory approval even under the best circumstances, Jillian Deutsch reports.

Others expect faster time frames, including a team from the University of Oxford that says it could develop a candidate by September. But Marco Cavaleri, head of the EMA’s vaccines strategy, said at a virtual public hearing he’s “skeptical [that] September is realistic.”

“We will be happy to be proven wrong,” Cavaleri said. “But we’re basing our prediction on our experience on assessing vaccines and seeing how long it takes to submit a file that is comprehensive.”

Cavaleri said EMA won’t “be cutting corners” when assessing vaccines and medicines for regulatory approval.

FCC ROUNDUP — E&C leadership will question Ajit Pai on the agency’s coronavirus response next week, especially as the pandemic has highlighted several issues under FCC’s purview including lack of high-speed broadband and telehealth, Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and ranking member Bob Latta(R-Ohio) said in a joint statement this week. The committee recently hosted FTC Chairman Joe Simons for a similar forum with the consumer protection subcommittee, POLITICO’s John Hendel writes.

Over in the Senate, lawmakers this week passed an amended version of the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, which would make 9-8-8 the phone number for a national suicide and mental health crisis hotline. The FCC had proposed the 3-digit hotline last year. The bill now heads to the House.

STIMULUS TELEHEALTH CASH FLOWS — More than 30 additional health care providers across the country were awarded stimulus cash under the FCC’s Covid-19 Telehealth Program. So far, about $33 million (or 17 percent) of the program’s available $200 million has been doled out to 82 providers in 30 states. The largest chunks of funding in this sixth round of grants went to facilities in Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas and Utah.

JUST IN TIME — A government-created public-private council released a guide on Thursday for protecting trade secrets, medical research and other “innovation capital.” The Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council’s cybersecurity task force released the 80-page Health Industry Cybersecurity Protection of Innovation Capital white paper in part to implement a recommendation from a task force established by a 2015 cybersecurity law.

“Recent indications of attempts at industrial espionage to steal vaccine data and other medical research make the HIC-PIC guide a particularly timely resource for the health sector,” Russell Koste, a co-chair of the HSCC task force, said in a statement.

What We're Reading

— In a Future Tense blog post, Piers Gooding writes about how maintaining anonymity in mental health treatment during the pandemic is increasingly difficult.

— WIRED’s Matt Burgess reports on secret NHS files revealing a contact tracing plan.