Apple and Google have competed for many years in mobile operating systems, smartphones, music services and many other markets. However, the coronavirus pandemic has forced these companies to put aside their hostility for a while and to unite. They announced a joint communications tracking system to stop the spread of the disease.
[cvct title=”COVID-19 Global Stats” label-total=”Total Cases” label-deaths=”Death Cases” label-recovered=”Recovered Cases” bg-color=”#ddd” font-color=”#000″]
At the time of writing, the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide is about 1.7 million; of which over half a million are in the United States. So, not surprisingly, Apple and Google decided to team up in the fight against coronavirus.
The result of the cooperation will be the technology of tracking the spreading of coronavirus. In other words, the corporations intend by mid-May to introduce special API for iOS and Android; For example, allowing to know with whom a person infected with COVID-19 has contacted. These data can be accessed by official health-care applications, which will be available on the App Store and Google Play. However, this is a temporary measure, because after a few months the contact tracking technology will be integrated at the system level, and by default run on all iOS and Android.
Apple and Google push Bluetooth in their new alliance. Unlike other methods involving the use of GPS or mobile operator data, there is no access to the location, which allows confidentiality.
Above all, people who have been diagnosed with a coronavirus will be required to report this themselves through a special app from the medical organization. Other users will then be notified that they have had contact with the infected. Smartphones will be able to share relevant information with each other at 5-minute intervals and maintain links in the database.
To protect privacy, Apple and Google have made provision for Bluetooth to send a special anonymous key that changes every 15 minutes. Therefore, it is not possible to determine the identity of the user when transmitting the data. In addition, there will be no publicly available centralized list of which devices are infected with COVID-19, as the smartphones themselves perform cryptographic calculations. On the server side there is only a key base, not interactions between them.
