“We must be realistic that such contact tracing methods are likely to exclude many vulnerable members of society who lack access to technology and are already being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic,” Jennifer Granick, ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, said in a statement. For Apple and Google, these close collaborations between such long-standing competitors are exceptionally unusual. Software companies have invested in mobile operating systems, app stores, media networks, and voice-recognition software for years — while exchanging barbs about the privacy of each other’s platforms. Nevertheless, both corporations have been under pressure to use their prodigious resources to help tackle the pandemic.
“All of us at Apple and Google agree that there has never been a more critical time to work together to solve one of the world’s most urgent problems,” the companies said in a joint statement. The system uses Bluetooth, a common way for most mobile devices to connect with each other. Apple and Google shared a theoretical example of how this works. Two people meet to chat for a few minutes, and their smartphones share anonymous identifiers in the background through Bluetooth to register that they have been in touch. These digital keys shift every 15 minutes or so and stay on these people’s privacy apps. The phone saves all successful keys and matches the individual’s key anonymously from the initial meeting days earlier. This sends a message to the phone of the other person with information from health officials about how to quarantine or self-isolate. Contact-tracking technology is not the first move against COVID-19 for either organization. Google launched an information website in March, while Apple released its own iPhone scanning software. Apple has also donated over 20 million masks to health-care workers and has designed face shields, and Verily, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc. is running virus-testing sites in some parts of California.