admin On Friday Apple and Google announced a major joint effort to support smartphone technology to include COVID-19 pandemic.
Both the companies decided to add a new software in smartphone technology that would be easier for bluetooth wireless technology to tress out the infected people from coronavirus.
This initiative has been taken to help governments roll out apps like contact tracking which is running on iPhones and Android phones. This technology will support bluetooth signals even in short range.
With this technology, contact- tracing apps would collect a record of other nearest phones. The collected data can be used to warn others who might have been infected by coronavirus.
This is only possible when the phone owners have installed the apps and agreed to share the data with public-health authorities. This kind of apps have been already developed by programmers countries including China, Singapore, India etc.
In Europe, the Czech Republic informed it will release such app this month. However, Britain, Germany and Italy are also developing their tracing tools. Privacy and Civil liberties activists have informed that this app needs to be designed so governments can’t misuse them to track their citizens.
Apple and Google stated in a joint statement that user privacy and security are baked into the design of their plan.
Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, stated she’ll be looking closely at the companies’ privacy assurances and for evidence that any health data they collect will be deleted once the emergency is over. “People are dying. We have to save lives. Everyone understands that,” she told. “But at some point, we’re going to have to understand the privacy consequences of this.”
Security experts also observe that technology alone cannot effectively track down and identify people who may have been infected by COVID-19 carriers. Such efforts will require other tools and teams of public health care workers to track people in the physical world, they say.
In South Korea and China, such efforts have implemented with the use of credit-card and public-transit records. With a great efforts, contact-tracing – a tool epidemiologists have long employed to include infectious disease outbreaks – the companies will roll out their changes in two phases.
In the first one, they will release software in May that allows public health authorities release apps for both Android and iOS phones. Then, in the coming months, they will also develop this functionality directly into the underlying operating systems.
On Friday, Apple and Google delivered preliminary technical specifications for “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing.”
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