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By Tripp Mickle, Rob Copeland and Sam Schechner 

SAN FRANCISCO -- 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 some 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.

Those unknowing individuals -- provided they, too, have opted in -- would receive a notification on their own phones, according to draft documents posted by the companies, such as, "ALERT: You have recently been exposed to someone who has tested positive for Covid-19. Tap for more information."

Apple and Google will release next month the first versions of software for the alert apps, which could be developed by public-health authorities, among others.

The private effort wasn't coordinated in advance with the White House task force that is looking at potential tech solutions to curb the spread of the virus, according to a person familiar with the matter. President Trump said Friday that the technology raised some privacy concerns, telling reporters: "It's very interesting but a lot of people worry about it in terms of a person's freedom. We're going to take a look at that, a very strong look at it."

The initiative would turn the smartphones in Americans' pockets into pandemic tracking devices. The concept, similar to that used most prominently in Singapore earlier this year, could make it easier to contain future outbreaks as people return to daily life. Many experts believe such a technological solution will be necessary before isolation measures can be fully removed.

Apple and Google's announcement comes as a patchwork of academics and tech companies in Europe and the U.S., including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been developing similar technologies and apps to alert people of potential infections. Promoters say the tools could allow many people to go back to work and school, while encouraging only those people who have been exposed to shelter in place.

But debate remains over whether voluntary apps would be adopted widely enough to provide much public-health benefit -- something other efforts have struggled with. The involvement of Apple and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, which together account for the operating systems in almost all smartphones, could address that concern.

"Contact tracing is very resource intensive, and anything that could help us do that would be very valuable," said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "But you'd need widespread adoption for that to scale."

Concerns have also revolved around whether the benefits of such a system would outweigh the potential exposure of sensitive information about where and with whom people spend time. Apple and Google said information about the other people users come into contact with wouldn't be shared unless a user volunteers it. They also said users' locations and personally identifiable information won't be collected. The companies began collaborating in late March, an Apple spokesman said.

Some privacy advocates praised Apple and Google's system because it is decentralized, rather than one in which all data is uploaded to central servers where it could be misused. In Apple's and Google's models, individual phones would determine independently whether they they'd spent time near devices of infected people -- and only then would potentially infected people be prompted to identify themselves to health authorities for testing.

"This is a very effective power play in favor of privacy by Apple and Google," said Michael Veale, an assistant professor of digital rights and regulation at University College London. "They have made a very conscious decision against very centralized databases, while still giving epidemiologists the data they need."

To work in the U.S., the system would require clearing two major hurdles: Users would have to volunteer to input personal health information into an app, and public health authorities would need to make testing more widespread.

Apple and Google said privacy and security would be central to the design. In a rare move, they published some of the proposed code behind the software so researchers can analyze it. The code shows, among other things, that all user data is deleted if an individual decides later to delete the app, and that any connections to the companies' advertising operations are disabled.

"There has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world's most pressing problems," the companies said in a joint statement.

The project represents a detente, for now, between two fierce rivals. It addresses what many technology and health officials have considered an indomitable obstacle: gaining adoption across different smartphone ecosystems that don't typically work together.

"These guys have resisted doing something like this because they didn't want to expose how creepy their devices are, but they feel they need to be proactive before someone like the government forces something on them, " said Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust Technologies Corp., a data-rights-management company. "The question is: Who's the trusted third-party that will collect and track the data?"

To be effective, health authorities and government officials would need to know that people are within a few feet of one another. GPS is too blunt an instrument to make such minute detections, but Bluetooth is more precise because it is based on proximity technology and has a range of about 30 feet.

It isn't clear whether the app's reliance on phone sensors risks triggering false positives, epidemiologists said. A workable app would need to be able to detect when devices were within about 6 feet for more than 10 or 15 minutes. More fleeting contacts, such as people one passes on the street, are less likely to lead to infection, they say.

"It still tends to be close contacts that are the biggest danger," Johns Hopkins's Ms. Rivers said. "One concern is that [these technologies] wouldn't be refined enough to be useful.

The array of sensors on phones should provide enough information to determine when people had significant enough exposure to pose a risk, Mr. Shamoon said, potentially generating sufficient information to ease social-distancing measures.

"Any kind of targeted lockdown is better than a wholesale lockdown," he said.

Apple and Google declined to comment on the potential for false positives.

Another concern for public-health officials is that apps might reach only certain populations of people who are more likely to have smartphones -- and then only those who opt in to the service. In 2019, Pew Research found that 53% of people 65 and older have a smartphone in the U.S., compared with 81% of the population as a whole.

--Kirsten Grind contributed to this article.

Write to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com, Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com and Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 10, 2020 17:49 ET (21:49 GMT)

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