APPLE and Google have launched a major joint effort to leverage smartphone technology to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.
New software the companies plan to add to phones would make it easier to use Bluetooth wireless technology to track down people who may have been infected by coronavirus carriers.
The idea is to help national governments roll out apps for so-called “contact tracing” that will run on iPhones and Android phones alike.
The technology works by harnessing short-range Bluetooth signals.
Using the Apple-Google technology, contact-tracing apps would gather a record of other phones with which they came into close proximity.
Such data can be used to alert others who might have been infected by known carriers of the novel coronavirus, although only in cases where the phones’ owners have installed the apps and agreed to share data with public-health authorities.
Software developers have already created such apps in countries including Singapore and China to try to contain the pandemic.
In Europe, the Czech Republic says it will release such an app after Easter. Britain, Germany and Italy are also developing their own tracing tools.
In South Korea and China, such efforts have included the use of credit-card and public-transit records. The measures taken and technology used by these Asian countries have been hailed as one of the key reasons they have been able to leave lockdown so quickly and with relatively few reinfections.
In China those given permissions to leave their accommodation after weeks of strict lockdown must have the right app with the right information displayed. The apps show coloured codes – red, yellow or green – and only people with the right colour are able to enter restaurants, use public transport, or undertake longer journeys.
Privacy and civil liberties activists have warned that such apps need to be designed so governments cannot abuse them to track their citizens.
In a rare joint announcement, Apple and Google said that user privacy and security are baked into the design of their plan.
Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said she will be looking closely at the companies’ privacy assurances and for evidence that any health data they collect will be deleted once the emergency is over.
“People are dying. We have to save lives. Everyone understands that,” she said. “But at some point, we’re going to have to understand the consequences of this on privacy.”
Security experts also note that technology alone cannot effectively track down and identify people who may have been infected by Covid-19 carriers. Such efforts will require other tools and teams of public health care workers to track people in the physical world, they say.
The technology solution relied on by countries with questionable human rights records, from China to Turkey, has allowed people a degree of freedom from lockdown – but has also prompted fears about the kinds of data that is being gathered about their citizens.
“The wave of surveillance we’re seeing is truly unprecedented, even surpassing how governments across the world responded to 9/11,” said Edin Omanovic, advocacy director of Privacy International.
“The laws, powers, and technologies being deployed around the world pose a grave and long-term threat to human freedom. Some measures are based on public health measures with significant protections, while others amount to little more than opportunistic power grabs.”
Given the great need for effective contact tracing – a tool epidemiologists have long employed to contain infectious disease outbreaks – the companies will roll out their changes in two phases.
In the first, they will release software in May that lets public health authorities release apps for both Android and iOS phones.
In coming months, they will also build this functionality directly into the underlying operating systems.
On Friday the companies released preliminary technical specifications for the effort, which they called “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing”.
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