Apple and Google team up on tech to detect proliferation of coronovirus

 Singapore's contact-detection app, TraceT altogether. Photo: Catherine Lai / AFP via Getty Image

 Apple and Google, makers of the world's two most comprehensive smartphone operating systems, announced that they are collaborating on contact-tracing tools to detect the spread of coronovirus viruses. Contact tracing is strictly what it sounds like: tracing that came in contact with an infected person.

 In the short term, the two companies will "work to help enable contact tracing on application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology." In layman terms, this is often software that allows Android and iOS devices to talk to each other and create a log of the devices they came into range. Someone who is infected would then be able to use an app with a way to indirectly notify device owners from unspecified "public-health officials" with whom they came. Those APIs and health apps are slated for release next month.

  Apple and Google are working directly on built-in Bluetooth-based contact tracing in each of their mobile operating systems, making it easier to track more universal contacts without specific applications.

 Contact-tracing applications are already deployed in countries such as Singapore, where 620,000 people have downloaded Trestel. The software uses Bluetooth to detect within two meters of coronovirus patients for at least half an hour. Last month, the Government of Singapore released an ASCII document for the app for the overall public so that other countries could use it.

 There are clear privacy implications for developing technology that track not only geographic location, but also relationships between specific locations and specific individuals. Within us, governments are already using telephone providers' location data to track how people are traveling and possibly spreading the disease. Google is already collecting location data to hunt for trends related to coronovirus. What is beneficial to the overall public in times of crisis, however, can easily be appointed to monitor.

 Apple and Google emphasize that "privacy, transparency, and consent are highly valued during this effort." Subsequently, companies have already issued technical specifications for how they decide to preserve privacy when collecting data. Given Team Cook's previous statements, criticizing Facebook's privacy practices and Apple's anti-tracker features being directly incorporated into Safari, he relied on perhaps the largest tech companies to work on such a system.

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