"People's identities aren't tied to any contact events," says White. If any of the numbers match, the app alerts the user that they made contact with an infected person, and displays instructions or a video about getting tested or self-quarantining. The server would then send out those contact event numbers to every phone in the system, where the app would check if any of the codes matched their own log of contact events from the last two weeks. (Covid-Watch would distribute those confirmation codes only to caregivers, to prevent spammers or faulty self-diagnoses from flooding the system with false positives.) When that confirmation code is entered, the app would upload all the contact event numbers from that phone to a server. Got a coronavirus-related news tip? Send it to us at a Covid-Watch user later believes they're infected with Covid-19, they can ask their health care provider for a unique confirmation code. In some cases, they're trying to keep even an infected individual's test results private while still warning anyone who might have entered their physical orbit. But as these systems roll out, teams of cryptographers have been racing to do the seemingly impossible: Enable contact-tracing systems without mass surveillance, building apps that notify potentially exposed users without handing over location data to the government. If abused, raw location data could reveal sensitive information about everything from political dissent to journalists' sources to extramarital affairs. The downside is the inherent loss of privacy. These so-called contact-tracing apps help public health officials get ahead of the spread of Covid-19, which may in turn allow an easing of social distancing requirements. Since Covid-19 first appeared, governments and tech firms have proposed-and in some cases already implemented-systems that use smartphone data to track where people go and with whom they interact. The paradoxical challenge: to build that vast tracking system without it becoming a full-on panopticon. Now, it sounds like a dystopian surveillance nightmare that could also save millions of lives and rescue the global economy. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, any system that used smartphones to track locations and contacts sounded like a dystopian surveillance nightmare.
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June 2023
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