House arrest tech may be introduced to make sure coronavirus patients stay home

While states are beginning to reopen up their economies, some state officials are deliberating on whether to introduce house arrest monitoring tech—including ankle bracelets and location-tracking apps—which would be used to police quarantines imposed by the coronavirus.

But the rollout of such an invasive type of technology has given rise to a big legal question: How can officials institute this tech without an offense or court order?

Hawaii considered implementing the sweeping use of GPS-enabled ankle bracelets and smartphone tracking apps in an effort to enforce the stay-at-home order given to arriving air passengers, according to Ronald Kouchi, president of the Hawaii state senate.

Kouchi said that Hawaiian officials were worried about travelers flouting the state’s two-week quarantine order, apparently putting the archipelago’s inhabitants at risk. But the plans for moving forward with the mass tracking of travelers was put on hold after the Hawaii attorney general’s office raised serious concerns.

“America is America,” Kouchi told Reuters. “There are certain rights and freedoms.”

While fielding written questions to the attorney general’s office, Hawaii’s Covid-19 Join Information Center mentioned the “various ideas being evaluated for tracking those under mandatory quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic are right now just that, ideas.”

These same ideas have been introduced in other states, though on a much smaller scale.

Seven people who violated quarantine rules in Louisville, Kentucky were court-ordered to wear GPS-tracking devices manufactured by Colorado-based SCRAM Systems, according to Amy Hess, the city’s chief of public services. While Hess mentioned she did not want to enforce the tech, she said it was for the sake of public health.

“We don’t want to take away people’s freedoms but at the same time we have a pandemic,” she said.

In Charleston, West Virginia, Kanawha County Sheriff Mike Rutherford told Reuters his force had leased 10 additional location-monitoring ankle bracelets from GEO Group Inc. at the beginning of the pandemic just “to be on the safe side.”

Some industry executives such as Shadowtrack Technologies Inc. President Robert Magaletta, whose Louisiana-based company supplies nearly 250 clients across the entirety of the criminal justice system, said there had been state and local governments inquiring about repurposing tools for quarantine enforcement, though he would not disclose who the prospective buyers were.

Kris Keyton, from Arkansas-based E-Cell, mentioned that he had been contacted by a state agency that wished to adapt his detainee-tracking smartphone app to enforce quarantine.

He said the changes the agency requested were purely cosmetic, such as swapping the word “client”—E-Cell’s term for arrestees—with the word “patient.”

“They just wanted to reskin our app,” he said.

The industry used two ways of keeping track of offenders: The first is through a traditional ankle bracelet, a battery-powered device which is fixed to a person’s leg and is monitored through GPS. The second is by way of a smartphone app, either used in conjunction with facial or voice recognition technology to make sure it’s attached to the correct person or, as with an app made by companies such as E-Cell, tethered via Bluetooth to a fitness tracker-style wrist-band to ensure it remains on or near the person it is intended to follow.

A QR code-enabled version of the app-and-wrist band solution is already being deployed in Hong Kong to enforce quarantines on travelers coming into the country. Poland uses facial recognition-powered version of the technology that regularly asks the user to upload a selfie to prove that they are indoors.

Magaletta of Shadowtrack said he was in talks with half a dozen countries from Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

In a meeting with reporters in April, Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union noted that several governments were entertaining the idea of using smartphones as ad hoc ankle monitors.

“As a technological matter that probably would be effective as long as too much precision is not expected,” Stanley said. But he cautioned that an enforcement approach to public health “often tends to backfire.”

Magaletta also communicated he was less comfortable tracking patients with Covid-19 as opposed to tracking criminals.

“Can you actually constitutionally monitor someone who’s innocent?” he asked. “It’s uncharted territory.”