LONDON - Contact tracing is a coordinated effort to pinpoint people who have potentially been exposed to Covid-19.
This is accomplished by employing dedicated contact tracers to identify people who may have come into contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus.
Several tech companies have created apps or frameworks to use people’s phones to automatically track contacts, but these efforts have been hampered by privacy concerns.
When Apple and Google announced three weeks ago that they'd developed software to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, it was a big deal. The tech giants are fierce competitors. They rarely cooperate. And together, their software controls about 3 billion smartphones, equal to almost 40 percent of the world’s population.
It seemed clever, assuming the privacy implications could be worked out. The software would silently keep track of people who’d been near someone who tested positive for the virus, prompting those contacts to be tested and quarantined if necessary. The idea was to automate part of a laborious process called contact tracing, which public health officials use to stem the spread of an infectious disease. Thorough contact tracing, they say, is crucial to allowing the world's economies to reopen without reigniting infection rates. But few organizations, if any, have ever done contact tracing at the scale that will be required to contain Covid-19.
Software developers flocked to tap the new Apple-Google capabilities. The state of Utah accelerated its work with Twenty, a small New York City-based social media app developer. Citizen, the developer of a public safety app with 4 million users nationwide, added a contact-tracing function to its app, though it is not yet activated. Tech executive Aniq Rahman helped create Zero, a group of about 200 developers and marketers including one of the developers of TraceTogether, Singapore’s contact-tracing app.
And why not? Cities and states were talking about hiring tens of thousands of contact tracers to manually reconstruct the movements of Covid-19 patients. But it wasn’t clear how these people could be hired and trained quickly enough to be useful. The Apple-Google software had the potential to do some of the same work effortlessly at a fraction of the cost.
However, Health officials have said ‘no thanks' to contact-tracing tech proposed by Silicon Valley companies to identify people potentially exposed to Covid-19.
Many states have employed contact tracing apps to slow the spread of COVID-19, prompting concern over new risks to privacy.
As European countries and U.S. states begin to reopen, we are all wondering what our world will look like in this next phase of the coronavirus crisis.
