You Have More Power Than You Know to Stop COVID-19
June 30, 2020
The Novel Technology for Stopping the Novel Coronavirus is Here
This may be the most important thing you read about COVID-19. You have the power to stop this virus with a tool you already own: a smartphone.
By now, you’ve probably heard of manual contact tracing — a public health intervention with a long history. Contact tracers talk to people with an infection and let their contacts know they may have been infected. In addition to rapid testing, washing our hands, wearing masks, and social distancing, it’s a powerful way to get COVID-19 under control.
But manual contact tracing alone, on the timeline and at the scale needed to combat COVID-19, is proving challenging, as recent experiences in Austin and New York City indicate.
We need to continue manual contact tracing; it’s a proven way to control a pandemic. However, much like bringing a knife to a gunfight, we need more in our arsenal than manual contact tracing. We need digital innovation.
Because it can work.
According to an Oxford study, adoption rates as low as 10% of an app that performs automated digital contact tracing or exposure alerting can effectively slow down the virus.
56% adoption can stop community spread.
The Problem: Current Contact Tracing Apps Use Surveillance Technology
I was concerned when I first heard about digital contract tracing in early February. It sounded like another excuse to track me; a new form of surveillance that will never go away, even after COVID-19 is over. You probably share these concerns.
And you’re not wrong.
Privacy-infringing contact tracing apps have already been released across the world. They collect different forms of personally identifying information like your contact list or GPS trajectory, and they monitor your movements. They are here in the United States, with the worst offenders in Utah and North Dakota. There’s even more sophisticated state-led surveillance in China and elsewhere.
Organizations like Human Rights Watch, ACLU, and EFF have expressed strong concerns about these technologies. Yet, there are now an abundance of apps (what some call a privacy trash fire) for disease tracking and COVID-19 contact tracing. Fortunately, they haven’t been adopted, because people correctly do not trust them.
To me, this is bad technology. And we don’t need it.
What if there was an alternative? What if there was a way to stop the virus with completely anonymous technology?
There is.
We can fight COVID-19 with good technology.
The Alternative: Anonymous Exposure Alerts
What if you could download an app and receive an alert that you may have been exposed to COVID-19, but you are the only person in the world who knows that information? What if the app could then send alerts to others without having to collect any data about you at all?
In this kind of system, surveillance and top-down mandates could be replaced with anonymity and empowered public action.
It’s possible to build anonymous communication like this, based on Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a radio signal that can share information locally, directly between phones, with no middle man. It can detect whether two app users were in contact without having to know who the two users were, so the users can send and receive alerts later while still remaining anonymous.
So, when you receive an alert, the choice is yours. You can choose to contact public health resources and contact tracers, or you can remain anonymous and simply follow the recommendations.
This isn’t 2019 privacy — this is genuine anonymity. And this isn’t just something helpful for COVID-19. This is possibly a solution. According to a Johns Hopkins user research study, 20% more people would adopt an anonymous app.
That could make the difference between slowing and stopping the virus.
Meet Covid Watch: This is Why We Exist
Covid Watch is a nonprofit made up of hundreds of volunteers worldwide, exponentially growing since mid-February to stop the exponentially growing virus. Our mission is to build mobile technology to fight the pandemic and defend digital privacy.
We are the first to bring you anonymous exposure alerts.
Started by two researchers from Stanford and University of Waterloo, the Covid Watch team was the first in the world to publish a groundbreaking white paper and open source anonymous exposure alert Bluetooth technology — the CEN Protocol, later renamed the TCN Protocol — in early March 2020. This was followed in early April by the rapid development of very similar decentralized protocols like DP^3T, PACT, and finally, the Google/Apple Exposure Notification framework.
Covid Watch and other research teams around the world advocated for Google/Apple to implement only this anonymous technology within their operating systems. And miraculously, they did. Their operating-system level APIs allow us to build the fully functional, anonymous system we originally envisioned.
Most of us are in the San Francisco Bay Area, the global epicenter of technology and innovation. We know how to build an app well: and the technology is done. We’re also an open community and we have accomplished so much because we have collaborated across six continents. Our four nonprofit founders are from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, so we have an international perspective.
As the Executive Director, I’ve worked 100-hour weeks for four months without compensation. All of the developers, designers, and researchers who built this project did this without expectation of financial compensation. We are motivated by the urgency of the pandemic and our vision of ending the health crisis through voluntary public action.
We also have expert advisers in public health, epidemiology, privacy, policy, and law from institutions including Stanford University, University of Waterloo, University of Washington, UCSF, and UC Berkeley who are collaborating with us.
Because they believe in the potential of this technology.
How You Can Help
If you are a university or public health department, visit our pilot page to learn more about how we can help your community. If you have the time, please join us in our volunteer effort. And if you can afford to do so, please donate to our cause.
We also need help getting the word out. Please share this post on social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram.
Learn more on our website. Stay tuned for more articles about how you can help, how Covid Watch works, how anonymous technology differs from the current technology that collects personally identifying information, and our progress on the first pilot of this technology in the United States coming soon to the University of Arizona.
In the coming months, it’s possible you’ll have the option to download our app in your region too. Don’t miss this opportunity to make a difference.
If you download the app, these are the two things you can do to help stop the virus:
(1) if you are diagnosed with COVID-19, use the app to send out anonymous alerts, and
(2) if alerted, stay home for the time recommended in the app.
That’s all it takes. It’s fully anonymous, unlike any other form of contact tracing, manual or digital, and easier to do than any other effective intervention.
This is how we can beat COVID-19. This is how we can stop the virus without any further unprecedented measures. This is how YOU can stop the virus.
Let’s do this.
