Last Friday, Apple and Google announced that they had started a collaboration to create a shared contact tracing system, which can therefore be used on both iPhones and Android smartphones to try to reduce coronavirus infections. The project is very ambitious and involves two of the largest and richest technology companies in the world, which have been competing in the mobile phone sector for years.
Along with the announcement, Apple and Google have provided some preliminary information about their system, which will be developed within a month and then shared with healthcare institutions who want to participate. In a short time, approximately three billion smartphones could become compatible with their solution, offering new opportunities and shared technological standards to combat the coronavirus epidemic.
Contact tracing
Contact tracing is a very useful practice during an epidemic to identify people who may have been infected with a contagion. Usually, those who get sick or test positive for coronavirus are interviewed by health personnel, with the aim of reconstructing which people they came into contact with and were therefore exposed to the risk of contagion. It's an important job that takes time and personnel to take care of, two resources that are scarce during a pandemic.
Technology can help overcome the problem of this scarcity, offering solutions to make contact tracing more widespread and shared. The first experiences in this sense were conducted by some Asian countries, such as South Korea, with applications that keep track of the geographical location of people and warn them in the event that they have passed in the vicinity of an individual who then tested positive for coronavirus.
These solutions have raised numerous concerns from the point of view of privacy protection. Moreover, they have not always led to convincing results, especially since applications have been made available in a short time that do more or less the same thing, but in different ways and without coordination for data sharing. The system of Apple and Google, at least in the projects, should allow these obstacles to be overcome.
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In a nutshell, the system that Apple and Google are working on allows each smartphone to periodically register the presence of other mobile phones that has around. Through the operating system (iOS or Android), each smartphone emits a unique identification code (ID) which is captured by the other phones nearby, and kept in their internal register with a time reference (date and time) on the moment in which it is been received. The IDs issued by each smartphone change frequently, for additional security precautions. There is no transmission of other data apart from the phone ID.
When the owner of a smartphone discovers that he is positive for coronavirus (either through a test or because he has become ill and has been diagnosed with COVID-19) he has the option of submitting his ID to a central online registry (database), managed by health institutions. All the other smartphones that use the system also connect themselves to that database of positives, comparing the IDs they have memorized with those reported. If they find a match, they notify their owner that they have been potentially exposed to the coronavirus.
How IDs are transmitted
Smartphones share IDs with other nearby mobiles via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the same standard that different wireless headsets use or physical activity trackers. Apple and Google have thought of some changes to adapt the system to the need to exchange IDs.
Theoretically BLE can maintain connections between devices up to a hundred meters away, but a lot depends on the individual devices and the presence of obstacles. One of the aspects that the designers are evaluating is to understand which distance range to cover with the new system, in order to have people's IDs at a distance that effectively constitutes a risk of contagion.
App
Apple and Google are therefore not working on an application, but on a system that is standard and on which healthcare institutions can then build their apps and centralized registry management. In a sense, they are building the railway, leaving others to build the trains that will pass over it. This solution should make it possible to have shared systems and reach a greater number of people, considering that iOS and Android together cover almost the entire market for smartphone operating systems.
Health Institutions
The idea of Apple and Google will only work if there is an adequate response from governments, health institutions and the public. The former will have the task of creating applications through which individuals can indicate that they are positive, so that their condition appears (anonymously) in the shared registers, to which other smartphones connect to check whether or not they have been in the vicinity of the cell phone of a person who is later discovered to be infected. Furthermore, the solution will only work if used by a large portion of the population.
Privacy and security
The system that Apple and Google are working on requires that the IDs are completely anonymous, and that there is therefore no possibility of tracing the identity of their owners. The lack of geographic tracking should also rule out the risk that malicious users can trace someone's movements. Furthermore, the data on smartphones crossed in public places will always and only remain on your mobile phone, which will then connect to the central register to download the list of positive IDs, but without uploading data to the register itself.
Even if malicious users obtain the complete list of IDs from the central registry, they are unlikely to obtain information that is relevant or that violates someone's privacy. In a certain sense, the system should guarantee some more protection compared to traditional social tracing, which involves interviews and collections of personal data by real employees, who therefore collect much more information about their interlocutors.
Despite the reassurances provided by Apple, Google and other experts, the new system has still raised some doubts on the part of those involved in privacy. The fear is that the basic version proposed by the two companies could be used in other ways by some governments, to build mass surveillance systems. However, the amount of data exchanged envisaged by the new standard should significantly reduce this risk. Furthermore, many applications that we already use every day collect a huge amount of information about our tastes, our preferences and above all about our movements, through the GPS and other sensors of our smartphones.
When
Apple and Google worked until mid-May to develop the new system, which can then be used to create and test the first applications. Google has clarified that it will distribute the update to make smartphones compatible through its application store, Google Play, in order to speed up its diffusion (an update via the operating system would have required more time, due to the numerous versions of Android that exist depending on of the individual devices). Apple, on the other hand, will make the system available through an iOS update, which it can perform more easily by having direct control not only on the software, but also on the devices (iOS only works on iPhones and iPads).
The two companies have also clarified that the ID system can be deactivated from the settings of each smartphone, and that therefore each individual can decide whether or not to participate in social tracking.