Sometime in May, you could receive a smartphone alert from your local health agency saying you may have come into contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19. Such a warning will be made possible by a feature that is nearly 30 years old: Bluetooth. The same wireless standard that lets you play Spotify playlists in your car or link your smartphone to your wireless earbuds is paving the way for the world’s largest experiment in digital contact tracing.
Contact tracing, or the act of tracking all those who have come into contact with an infected person, is normally a laborious process performed by health officials. It’s been key in slowing down the spread of some of the worst infectious diseases to hit humans, including polio, HIV/AIDs, polio, and Ebola. Now, it’s made easier by the fact that a huge fraction of the world’s population have devices that can track their location.
Since coronavirus hit China, more than a billion people have downloaded one of the smartphone apps created by tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to track the virus. The apps generate color codes based on a person’s risk level of contracting the virus, and freely share GPS location and personal data with the police. A similar strategy is being used by Israeli telcos working with their national security agency.
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