- In the face of the global pandemic,
Apple and Google are doing something they almost never do,
work together.
- Beginning next month,
Apple and Google are releasing software.
- [Newscaster] The two companies will roll out
a contact tracing system.
- [Newscaster] Will use Bluetooth to help notify someone
if they've been in contact with someone who's infected.
- On April 10th,
the companies announced a new project to halt
the spread of the novel coronavirus.
It's a system for automatically
and autonomously logging all
the people you've been in contact with.
So if one of those people gets diagnosed with coronavirus,
you'll get an alert saying you've been exposed
and should quarantine.
It's a really ambitious project
and we're only a couple weeks in,
but it could make a huge difference
in how we recover from the outbreak.
The system works by blasting out short codes over Bluetooth,
technically the Bluetooth low-energy beacon system.
Your phone collects a log of all the codes you've received,
representing all the people
who have been close enough to infect you.
Those codes are encrypted and constantly changing,
so you can't use them to work back to a person's identity.
Even if someone does test positive
and decides to share that diagnosis,
it's still pretty hard to figure out who the person is,
although it's not completely impossible.
More importantly,
the codes you collect never leave your phone.
So there's no master list of who's interacting with who.
The details here are a little complex,
and we'll link to a more thorough explanation
in the description,
but the important thing is
it's not collecting absolute location data,
and there are a lot of measures
to keep you anonymous while you're using it.
Apple and Google hope to make an API available
to public health agencies by mid-May,
which means that by the summer,
you could see an app using this system built
and distributed by your state government.
In the months after that,
they're gonna ship it as an update to iOS and Android.
So it'll still require explicit permission,
they're not trying to sign anyone up
for this against their will,
but don't be surprised
if you start seeing pop-up notifications asking
if you wanna join the project.
That's important because by the time the summer gets here,
we're gonna really need a system like this.
We don't know how the outbreak is gonna play out,
but optimistic projections show U.S. hospitalizations,
peaking in April and declining throughout May,
assuming we keep social distancing restrictions in place
and do everything else right.
As we start to open up again,
we're gonna need some way
to keep contagious people quarantined
while everyone else goes back to work.
And because people can be contagious for five days
before they show any symptoms of the disease at all,
that's gonna be really hard.
People who work with outbreaks have a system for doing this,
although we've never done it at this scale before,
it's called contact tracing.
Basically, when someone gets a positive diagnosis,
you sit them down and run through everything they did
during the contagious period.
Where they went, who they talked to,
anyone who might've been close enough to catch the disease.
Then you find all of those people
and get them into quarantine,
making sure this particular infection doesn't spread
any further than that circle of people.
If you're doing enough tests and quarantining enough people,
then the disease has nowhere to spread.
We've seen this system work for coronavirus
in countries like Singapore and South Korea,
and it's generally been through mobile alerts.
It's a lot easier to get 15 people's phone numbers
than to track down 15 people in person.
And if you cut out the interviewer
and just have an app do it, it's even simpler.
Outside of Singapore and South Korea,
most countries haven't been able
to launch a contact tracing app,
although a lot of places have tried.
But having Apple and Google onboard means you know
this system will ship to billions of phones
and you know there won't be any permissions problems
about collecting the Bluetooth data.
They're the only two companies in the world
that can do this,
so having both of them signed on makes
a huge difference in what you can do.
At the same time,
there's a lot that Apple and Google
are explicitly not gonna do.
They're not building the alert apps
or setting rules for how to quarantine.
They aren't even touching the question
of how you verify that everyone
who sends an alert through the app actually is infected,
weeding out the trolls and false positives.
All they've built is a way to log contacts and send alerts,
and then a way to get that system onto phones.
Everything else is gonna come down
to the public health agencies,
which have never dealt with anything on this scale before.
There's a real question as to how much people trust them
with this system.
And an even bigger question is
to whether they can pull it off.
So far, most of those agencies have been too busy scrambling
for hospital beds and ventilators to get much
of a contact tracing effort underway.
We still don't have nearly enough testing
and the federal response has given way
to a kind of free-for-all among the states
who are already running out of resources.
Apple and Google just can't solve that problem.
But if the system they've laid out is gonna work,
those agencies and the public sector in general
are gonna have to get better fast.
So we're doing a ton of reporting on this system
and there's a lot that didn't make it into this video,
so we're leaving a bunch of links in the description
and there's a bunch more stuff coming
that's gonna be on the site in the next week or so.
So stay tuned for that,
and otherwise, stay safe out there.