Apple and Google launched a major joint effort to leverage smartphone technology to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
The technology works by harnessing short-range Bluetooth signals. Using the Apple-Google technology, contact-tracing apps would gather a record of other phones with which they came into close proximity. Such data can be used to alert others who might have been infected by known carriers of the novel coronavirus, although only in cases where the phones' owners have installed the apps and agreed to share data with public-health authorities.
Software developers have already created such apps in countries including Singapore and China to try to contain the pandemic. In Europe, the Czech Republic says it will release such an app this month. Britain, Germany, and Italy are also developing their own tracing tools.
Privacy and civil liberties activists have warned that such apps need to be designed so governments cannot abuse them to track their citizens. Apple and Google plan said in a joint announcement that user privacy and security are baked into the design of their plan.