Apple and
Google are teaming up to allow contact tracing on many of the world’s smartphones. The partnership will
allow an estimated 3 billion people to
opt in to location tracking
through Bluetooth on their smartphones for the purposes of combating the
Covid-19 pandemic.
Users will
be able to receive alerts if they come into contact with someone who tested
positive for Covid-19. The collaboration will require the world’s two biggest
mobile operating systems, Android and iOS, to work together in a way that is
unprecedented.
Both companies
wrote in nearly identical announcements published on their respective
websites:
Across the world, governments and health
authorities are working together to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, to
protect people and get society back up and running. Software developers are
contributing by crafting technical tools to help combat the virus and save
lives. In this spirit of collaboration, Google and Apple are announcing a joint
effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health
agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central
to the design.
The
initiative will involve two steps. Next month, both Apple and Google will
release APIs that allow contact tracing through third-party apps released by public
health authorities. Users of both iOS and Android devices can download the
official apps through their respective app stores.
Then, in
the coming months, both companies will build an even broader contact tracing
tool that won’t require users to download a third-party app. Anyone who chooses
to opt in will then have their information shared with government health
authorities and other contact tracing apps.
The use
of such apps to track Covid-19 cases was
first seen in China, and it has been applied to a less extreme degree in other
Asian countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. The general consensus was that data privacy
laws and cultural mores would prevent contact tracing from taking off in the West. That assumption has proved to be
wrong, as governments in the US, UK, and EU have recently embraced the concept.
France will
launch a Stop Covid app for contact tracing. The UK’s
National Health Service is working on such an app that will instantly notify
users of close contacts with people who have tested positive for Covid-19.
Privacy and
civil liberty groups around the world have raised concern over how such
technology, even during an unprecedented public health crisis, will fare in the
hands of governments and Big Tech.
Kurt
Opsahl, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote:
Bluetooth contact tracing is a vast improvement
over location tracking with GPS or cell site information, but it still needs
strong privacy and security safeguards. Apple and Google have said they will
protect users’ privacy—we will hold them to their word. Developers must be sure
they are developing apps that will protect and preserve the privacy and
liberties we all cherish.
From Quartz and BBC (edited)
