Virginia has announced an exposure notification app called covidwise, based on Google and Apple’s approach. The privacy design looks pretty good, but I don’t have time to dive deeply. Any thoughts or experience from SDMBers? The approach looks very similar to the app just released in Canada.
The description says it uses Bluetooth Low Energy to share tokens with nearby phones also using the app. The app measures distance by signal strength rather than location data. The tokens are anonymous, and changed every 15 minutes. The app saves the tokens. If a person tests positive for covid-19, the Virginia Department of Health gives the person a code they may (but do not have to) enter into the app, and their tokens from the prior 2 weeks are added to a list of tokens representing positive results. Each app downloads that list daily. If your saved tokens match any on the list, you are notified. Here’s the Governor’s press release on the app: https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2020/august/headline-859803-en.html
For something like this to be effective, you need a large portion of the population to buy into it. If there’s one thing Americans have proven, it’s that a large portion of them will refuse to buy into anything that goes against their ideology, even if it kills them. I don’t see this working well here, sadly.
I don’t have location turned on on my phone let alone wifi, NFC, or Bluetooth. My reception is spotty enough that the battery barely lasts the day with all the trying to connect and reconnects the phone goes through. In my world this app is a no.
Kind of thought that if a real tracing app would work it would have to be totally anonymous. Along the lines of “hey you were near someone yesterday that tests positive, go get checked out later this week. Self isolate until then.”
The data is supposed to be unified. Apple and Google have added anonymous tracking info at the platform level and the various apps should all be consuming the same map of contacts, the variation would be only in the presentation and notification mechanisms.
It’s the same framework that was used by Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland. Due to how it works and the privacy protecting methodology, it’s tricky to measure how well they are doing, but Ireland added an optional “share some data with us” functionality and it appears that they are happy with the results.
As you noted, privacy was the primary focus when the framework was developed, with the assumption being that without privacy, it wouldn’t be used on a large scale (which turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction). Also, this framework ties directly into the operating system, so once activated, it doesn’t have to be actively running, which is another reason that the more centralized apps have fared poorly. Install, allow notifications, done.
It’s also really easy for any government to implement, as both Ireland and Germany have made their code open source. While I haven’t looked at Ireland’s code base, I have looked through the German version. It uses localization resource files, so translating it into different languages is a piece of cake. If you happen to need it in one of the languages below, it’s already been done for you:
It wasn’t on GitHub yet, but each language is actually a piece of cake to implement when resource localization is used. I’m sure they’d be fine if you wanted to help with a Spanish version. You typically have a file for each language that looks like the below text (this is the beginning of their Arabic file on GitHub). Then the app just subs in the appropriate text for each action, button, etc., based on which language was chosen.
“Alert_TitleGeneral” = “حدث خطأ.”;
“Alert_ActionOk” = “موافق”;
“Alert_ActionRetry” = “تكرار”;
“Alert_ActionCancel” = “إلغاء”;
“Alert_ActionRemove” = “إزالة”;
“Alert_BluetoothOff_Title” = “تشغيل Bluetooth”;
“Alert_BluetoothOff_Description” = “قم بتنشيط Bluetooth في إعدادات النظام لاستخدام هذا التطبيق.”;
California has released a contact tracing app which will go live on Thurs. It sounds like previous attempts in other states weren’t very successful. For those roll outs, people could still shrug off the virus since the rate of infection wasn’t as high. But maybe with the high rate of infection, the more technologically proficient user base and hopefully some improvements in the app, it might help.
I have the app and started a thread about it here, trying to get people to install it. I also pushed it on my Facebook page and among all the people I see in person (outside, socially distanced). Since I don’t spend much time near anyone, I haven’t gotten any notifications (thankfully). That, plus I doubt many people have it installed.
It’s completely anonymous and doesn’t even use GPS, just bluetooth to exchange anonymous codes. It doesn’t know where you’ve been or who you’ve been close to, it just knows whether you’ve been close to someone who tested positive. You never send any information up, unless you test positive and decide to tell the servers that. Then, the servers tell everyone that if they’ve been close to someone with your code, they may have been exposed.