What is contact tracing technology, for which Apple and Google joined hands

Contact tracing is a technique to find out how many people have come in contact with an infected person and then figuring out the entire web of people those individuals interacted with. The tracing is done through smartphone's Bluetooth signals, which would identify with whom all the owner of the device recently met, level of proximity and duration of the meeting, if it was long enough to catch a contagion. As the tracing goes on, a warning message is sent to all those who came in contact with the infected person, along with a local health authority. The technique would help prevent the outbreak of the deadly diseases like COVID-19.

Since the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus, many tech companies have been working on building various applications to conduct a similar tracking, but their major limitation came in terms of scale, features, software or region.

On Friday, Technology giants Apply and Google announced their joint project to develop a contact tracing application which would track the spread of novel coronavirus  without compromising a person’s privacy and location. The app, which would run on both iOS and Android phones, would cover a whole lot of region and would be accessed by most of the population across the globe, The app is set to be released  sometime in mid-May.

Apple and Google said in a joint statement,"Privacy, transparency and consent are of utmost importance in this effort and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders."

One of the spokesperson of the joint project told WIRED, "This is a very unprecedented situation for the world. As platform companies we’ve both been thinking hard about what we can do to help get people back to normal life and back to work effectively. We think in bringing the two platforms together we can solve digital contact tracing at scale in partnership with public health authorities and do it in a privacy-preserving way."

If the application, on which both the companies are working for past two weeks, turns successful it would provide relief to many countries as it would lead to easing of lockdown and border restrictions.

The critics are sceptical over the privacy issue and believe that the success of the application mainly depends on mass testing, as it is based on the assumption that most of the population would be tested.

US President, Donald Trump in a press conference at the White House said, "We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyse...It's very interesting, but a lot of people worry about it in terms of a person's freedom."

The European Union Data Protection organisation reacted positively towards the launch and said,"We're going to take... a very strong look at it, and we'll let you know pretty soon." It added: "The initiative will require further assessment, however, after a quick look it seems to tick the right boxes as regards user choice, data protection by design and pan-European interoperability."