Google and Apple release APIs for COVID-19 contact tracing

ByJohn Titor

May 27, 2020 API, Apple, contact tracing, covid 19, google, privacy

While the world is fighting against COVID-19 spreading, many governments are adopting an official contact tracing application to have a technological weapon that might help tracing, and eventually isolating, infected people that may have been in contact with the virus.

This feature has raised concerns of the community, with some people talking about government’s plot, or just a potential privacy leak, since this kind of application autonomously and silently can gather information about our movements or social interactions.

In order to enable applications to perform the right way, Google and Apple recently released an update of their mobile operating systems to disclose related API (Applicaton Programming Interfaces) and allow third-party’s apps to access Bluetooth functionality and solve a problem of existing apps that sometimes fail to detect each other.

Most are unaware of this, but if you want to check if this thing affects your mobile, just go to Settings->Google and you’ll probably find a menu item called “COVID-19 exposure notifications“.

Contact-tracing apps are designed to automatically log when two people come into proximity to each other for a significant amount of time.

If one is later diagnosed with the coronavirus, the other can be given an alert, which might suggest they self-isolate and/or request a medical test of their own.

These APIs themselves are not enough to perform contact tracing, since they just offer the required tools to contact tracing apps. If these are enabled within an app from your region’s government public health authority, your phone shares random IDs with other nearby phones that also have turned on the exposure notifications system.

This means that, before being traced, people have to explicitly install the app and enable exposure notifications. This allows to choose wheter to participate to contact tracing or not.

In this article we don’t want to describe in depth how it works, technical details can be found anywhere on the internet (e.g.:https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52740131). What we want to do, with this article, is to stimulate a strong reflection in those that are focused only on privacy issues, despite of social usefulness of such a technological tool.

While is clear how COVID-19 is a worldwide emergency at the present time, it’s probably less clear that in this emergency, reponsibility of adopting the right behaviour to limit virus spreading is up to common people. Lockdown is something that has been imposed by world governments, but should start from the foundations of a community.

Saying: “i will not meet or have contact with friends or family” is hard, but becomes less hard if we think: “i will not meet you because i could be the one who brings you the virus”. This means something really stronger, such as:” I care about you!”. And if we enlarge the scope from the closest relatives or friends, to the whole community, this should beat skepticism and push people to give up for a (very) little amount of privacy and participate to contact tracing.

Moreover, those who strongly scream about privacy leaking should think that we started giving up our privacy many years ago, when we started using smartphones, voice assistants, smartTVs, social networks and so on. The only difference is that we were unaware of it till latest years because no media has been talking about it like now.