- The novel coronavirus excels at spreading because it’s contagious when there are few or no symptoms.
- That’s why governments are resorting to lockdowns, travel bans, and other economy-crippling restrictions.
- A team of 130 volunteer researchers just rolled out a technology framework that aims to help people return to work using an epidemiological principle called contact tracing.
- Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing would use Bluetooth low-energy (which nearly all smartphones have) to anonymously detect close encounters with infected users and warn those who were exposed.
- The group says it built the framework with anonymity and privacy as a cardinal rule.
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**Dana is engrossed in the music piping through her Bluetooth headphones on her commute to work — a grocery-store worker, her job is considered essential — when a man sits down behind her on the bus.
She doesn’t notice that he’s come within 6 feet, and she doesn’t hear him cough into his elbow.
But days later, a free app on Dana’s smartphone alerts her to news she’d been dreading since installing it: She was likely exposed to someone with COVID-19.
Dana got the alert because the man on the bus saw a doctor, tested positive, and was given a special code to type into the same free app. Once he did, his phone uploaded a list of encrypted codes to a central server — strings of letters and numbers that anonymously represent every close interaction he’s had with other app users over the past 21 days. The server then notified all the users that generated those codes of possible exposure, including Dana.
This is the future envisioned by a team of more than 130 European scientists and technologists**
