The organization running a given app still needs to act responsibly. Although Google and Apple say they’ll only upload anonymous identifiers from users’ phones, a server could nonetheless identify Covid-19 users in other ways, such as based on their IP address. Sticking to Bluetooth alone doesn’t guarantee the system won’t violate users’ privacy, White notes. It’s following the exact suggestions from our engineers about how implement it."
"It’s clear from the API that it was influenced by our work. "It looks like we won," says Stanford's White, whose Covid-Watch project, part of a consortium of projects using a Bluetooth-based system, had advocated for the Bluetooth-only approach. With Google and Apple's announcement, it's clear that the companies chose to skirt those privacy pitfalls and implement a system that collects no location data. Since those systems collect location data, they would require complex cryptographic systems to avoid collecting information about users' movements that could potentially expose highly personal information, from political dissent to extramarital affairs. Google and Apple's Bluetooth-based system has some significant privacy advantages over GPS-based location-tracking systems that have been proposed by other researchers including at MIT, the University of Toronto, McGill, and Harvard.
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But while the phones would exchange "beacon" numbers via Bluetooth, users would still need to download a contact-tracing app to either declare themselves as Covid-19 positive or to learn if someone they've come into contact with was diagnosed. In a second iteration of the system rolling out in June, Apple and Google say they'll allow users to enable Bluetooth-based contact-tracing even without an app installed, building the system into the operating systems themselves. "This thing has to run 24-7, so it has to really only sip the battery life," said one of the project's spokespeople. And Apple and Google say that the protocol they're releasing will be designed to use minimal power to save phones' battery lives. It will lift that restriction specifically for contact-tracing apps. Until now, however, Bluetooth-based schemes like the one White described suffered from how Apple limits access to Bluetooth when apps run in the background of iOS, a privacy and power-saving safeguard. "What the app uploads instead of any identifying information is just this random number that the two phones would be able to track down later but that nobody else would, because it's stored locally on their phones."
"People's identities aren't tied to any contact events," said Cristina White, a Stanford computer scientist who described a very similar Bluetooth-based contact tracing project known as Covid-Watch to WIRED last week. The advantage of that system, in terms of privacy, is that it doesn’t depend on collecting location data.
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