Google, Apple to create contact tracing technology to fight coronavirus spread

Apple Inc. and Google will build software together that would alert people if they were in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus, an unprecedented collaboration between two Silicon Valley giants and rivals.

The project, which is certain to raise privacy concerns, offers the most concrete technological solution to date for governmental authorities searching for ways to at least partially lift the lockdown orders that have swept the nation. The companies are by far the world’s biggest smartphone software providers, with billions of users world-wide.

The companies said jointly Friday that the “contact tracing tools” they are developing would be built into smartphones, using existing Bluetooth technology that tracks whether phones have passed within a certain distance of one another. If a user tests positive for the coronavirus and chooses to participate in the system, other phones will be able to search through their location data to determine whether they passed close enough for long enough to risk a potential exposure within the past 14 days.

They will work together on technology that will allow mobile devices to trade information via Bluetooth connections to alert people when they have been in close proximity with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, the sometimes deadly respiratory disease associated with the novel coronaviru


The technology will first be available in mid-May as software tools available to contact tracing apps endorsed by public health authorities. However, Apple and Google also plan to build the tracking technology directly into their underlying operating systems in the coming months so that users do not have to download any apps to begin logging nearby phones.

The companies said the technology will not track the location or identity of users, but instead will only capture data about when users' phones have been near each other, with data being decrypted on the user's phone rather than the companies' servers. GPS location data is not part of the effort, the companies said.

Governments worldwide have been scrambling to develop or evaluate software meant to improve the normally labor-intensive process of contact tracing, in which health officials go to recent contacts of an infected person and ask them to self-quarantine or get tested.


Several health technology experts have said the involvement of Apple and Google would be a massive boost to their efforts, as contact tracing apps from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others struggled to make their apps work across competing operating systems.