[Tina White is a friend of mine and co-founder of COVID Watch, a promising app for improving contact tracing for the coronavirus while preserving privacy. I commissioned Tom Higgins to write this post in order to bring attention to this important project and put it in context of related efforts. -Jess Riedel]
Countries around the world have been developing mobile phone apps to alert people to potential exposure to COVID-19. There are two main mechanism used:
- Monitoring a user’s location, comparing it to an external (typically, government) source of information about infections, and notifying the user if they are entering, or previously entered, a high-risk area.
- Detecting when two users come in close proximity to each other and then, if one user later reports to have been infected, notifying the second user and/or the government.
The first mechanism generally uses the phone’s location data, which is largely inferred from GPS.a The second method can also be accomplished with GPS, by simply measuring the distance between users, but it can instead be accomplished with phone-to-phone bluetooth connections… [continue reading]
