Here's How Apple and Google Plan to Track the Coronavirus Through Your Phone

By Sam Schechner and Rolfe Winkler 

Do Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google hold the key for tracking the spread of Covid-19 and possibly reopening the global economy?

The tech giants on Friday said they will release tools for software developers to create so-called contact-tracing apps that record when smartphones come into close contact with each other. Such apps could warn users if they were nearby someone later diagnosed as positive for Covid-19.

The plan, which could potentially cover most of the world's smartphones, is ambitious and almost surely will be controversial in certain quarters for privacy and other reasons.

To work, it requires widespread adoption, as well as broad testing of potentially infected people, and it isn't yet clear whether government and public-health officials will get behind the idea.

Apple and Google's efforts put the two companies at the center of a push to use technology to limit the spread of the virus, positioning them as potentially unavoidable partners for governments. That could have an impact on the effort's effectiveness, as certain countries in Europe have long sought to limit the power of giant technology companies and viewed their initiatives with skepticism.

President Trump said Friday that the White House will take a "very strong look" at the plan.

Apple and Google don't intend their infrastructure to be used by a wide variety of app developers to build on, according to a person familiar with the project. Ideally they hope for one app per country to support a coordinated response by national governments, though the team is still working through details, the person said. The companies plan to vet apps closely and limit those that can use the new protocol. As a result, the two companies might wield a strong influence over the types of contact-tracing apps that are released around the world.

In the traditional contact-tracing model, epidemiologists ask the newly diagnosed to recall where they have been and who they came into contact with. The goal is to identify, test and isolate those contacts quickly enough to slow an outbreak. It is less effective for fast-spreading diseases because conducting interviews and reaching contacts takes time.

Some experts believe that approach remains best, including an influential group from Duke University that issued a report on the topic this week.

As a counter, a growing patchwork of tech companies, governments and researchers have been developing their own approaches to facilitating this process, but the differences in how they work matters to both doctors and privacy activists.

Some countries in Asia have tapped into cellular-network data for location information to track the close contacts of infected people. Other places, including Catalonia, in Spain, have released voluntary apps that send users' symptoms, and frequent location pings, back to a government health authority, according to health officials and the app's developer.

Privacy activists have taken issue with the use of location data even in fighting an epidemic because it can reveal very sensitive information, stigmatizing people and discouraging cooperation with public-health authorities.

Instead of tracking devices' specific locations, apps using the new protocol from Apple and Google would track proximity to other devices. To do so, they would rely on a technology built into smartphones called Bluetooth that is normally used to connect wireless headphones or transfer files to nearby devices.

In a diagram Google published Friday showing how the system would work, a woman sits next to a man on a park bench. Their phones each broadcast anonymous identification numbers, and each log the number the other broadcasts. The ID numbers change every 15 minutes, protecting each user's anonymity.

The man later marks a positive Covid-19 test in the app, which then uploads keys to a server that match with the ID numbers his app has broadcast the prior 14 days. The app on the woman's phone regularly downloads keys for people who have tested positive. Her phone finds a match with the man's key. The app then gives her guidance on what to do next -- such as self-isolating, notifying health officials and getting tested.

The app wouldn't tell the woman the identity of the person she came into contact with who tested positive. Also to protect her privacy, and those of other users who never come in contact with a confirmed coronavirus case, the list of ID numbers she has come into contact with never leaves her phone. The companies' plan aims to keep information about who people come into contact with on personal devices rather than collecting that data and storing it on servers.

Epidemiologists say they eventually would want to know the identities of people who had come in contact with a confirmed case. The system Apple and Google are building wouldn't be able to do that centrally, but apps could be built on top of it that ask users if they want to notify health authorities once a match is made.

Apple and Google's plan "appears to mitigate the worst privacy and centralization risks," Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement released Friday. Among other things, she said, the organization hopes to make sure the data collection remains voluntary and that it is used only for public-health purposes.

Not yet clear is who will build these apps for public-health authorities, who will also have to determine a process for logging positive tests. A self-reporting system would be open to widespread abuse. Will doctors log positive tests? How will they authenticate themselves within the app? There is also the risk of potential false positives if, for instance, Bluetooth registers a contact with someone on the other side of a window or wall.

Despite the uncertainty, including over what apps Apple and Google will approve, developers are moving forward.

Dana Lewis and her husband began developing a Bluetooth contact-tracing app called CoEpi, short for Community Epidemiology in Action, in late February. Ms. Lewis, 31 years old, has Type 1 diabetes and wanted an app that would let a user report symptoms such as dry cough that could be relayed to others they had been in close contact with before the person receives results back from a Covid-19 test, a process that can take days if the person can be tested at all.

CoEpi is part of the Temporary Contact Number coalition, a group of developers working on Bluetooth contact tracing. Accessing the Bluetooth functionality of smartphones will be easier, she said, after the Apple-Google protocol is released in May, especially on iPhones, which Apple controls more tightly than Google controls Android devices.

Ms. Lewis says CoEpi is working with health organizations and hopes her app, because it focuses on symptoms rather than positive tests, would be approved.

Write to Sam Schechner at [e-mail] and Rolfe Winkler at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 11, 2020 11:29 ET (15:29 GMT)

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