Apple and Google team up to trace coronavirus

Apple and Google team up in what would be an unusual partnership to track the coronavirus and alert people if they are coming in to contact with someone who’s had the coronavirus.

With the increasing news about how AI will help combat the Coronavirus, it’s another initiative that aims to stall the spread of the virus within communities.

How will the technology work?

Their contact-tracing method is thought to be able to work by using a smartphone’s Bluetooth technology ‘with user privacy and security central to the design’ which will determine where the owner had recently been and use data of coronavirus cases for that selected area.

This data will trigger a notification to let the user know they are in close proximity to someone who’s had coronavirus. The software will begin to be available in May through a downloadable app, both companies said in a joint press release earlier today. Each of their official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

Apple is the developer of iOS and Google is the company behind Android, the two operating systems that power the vast majority of smartphones in use across the world giving them a combined advantage of rolling the initiative out at a faster rate than a local government.

Countries including Singapore, Israel, South Korea, and Poland are using people’s handsets to issue coronavirus contagion alerts, while health authorities in the UK, France, and Germany are working on initiatives of their own.

Apple and Google team up with the aim to bring coherence to all this by allowing existing third-party apps to be retrofitted to include their solution allowing countries to use this data and free up resources to focus on controlling the spread of the Coronavirus.

Are there any data privacy risks?

Both companies have made it clear that the data is only available from people who agree to submit their data, opt-in, and agree to be tracked.

In Apple’s press release it stated: “Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.”

The European Union’s Data Protection Supervisor welcomed the technology in a series of tweets, saying: “The initiative will require further assessment, however, after a quick look it seems to tick the right boxes as regards user choice, data protection by design and pan-European interoperability.”

The software is a replica of what China controversially used on their citizens to curb the spread of the Coronavirus.

Apple and Google have reassured users about the potential privacy implications of a mass-tracking system by explaining that GPS location data will not be used, nor will the technology track the location or identity of users.

Instead, both Apple and Google said that the program will only capture data about when users’ phones have been near each other, and will not be decrypted on the companies’ servers.

Apple and Google team up to also ‘enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms’ which will make the data more widely available to people who opt-in.

If the technology is successful it could help relax border restrictions, country lockdowns, and also curb the spread after by alerting people traveling off their risk to contracting Coronavirus.