About this episode
No sooner had the stay-at-home orders come down than mobile app developers around the world began to imagine how our smartphones could make it safer for everyone to venture back out. Dozens of countries and a handful of US states are now urging citizens to download government-blessed apps that use GPS-based location tracking, the Bluetooth wireless standard, or a combination of both to alert us when we’ve crossed paths with an infected individual—information that could tell us when we need to self-isolate for the protection of others.
But who controls this data, and what kinds of privacy protections are built in? To get a handle on how different apps work, three MIT Technology Review journalists built the Covid-19 Tracing Tracker, a public database that rates tracing apps according to principles devised by the American Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations. They say they’re learning that not all tracing apps are the same, and that in the end, it may be Google and Apple, not governments, that wind up imposing key privacy protections.
