Covidwise: The First Coronavirus 'Exposure Notification' App Has Launched in Virginia

for this useful app with very little privacy risk. Thanks for joining us, Jeffrey bet I wanted to talk about this app out of Virginia. It's called covid wise. It's an exposure notification app using Bluetooth on your phone. So you might have heard some other contact tracing apps with

regards to coronavirus, this one is a little different. Your Bluetooth sends out pings basically, and if you've come into contact with somebody for more than fifteen minutes and you're within six feet distance, the app might tell you you've

been exposed. Then you can go get a test. All that usually we bring you on on the podcast, Jeff, when we're talking about privacy with apps and things like that, and in this case, you've kind of runed this thing through many tests and you've kind of come to the conclusion that your privacy really isn't at risk and it would actually be a benefit if people, a lot of people downloaded this thing so we can try to keep

this thing under control. So Jeff, tell us a little bit about COVID wise and the tests you ran through it and what your conclusions were. Nobody was more surprised than me. The big problem that a lot of these apps and the idea of using our phones to help track exposure to the coronavirus has had is that people, frankly, just don't trust tech companies and that they just don't

trust the government. And I can't blame you. Companies have done very little to earn that trust in Edward Snowden taught us all that the government really can't be trusted either.

But that said, when Google and Apple the spring got together and said, hey, they thought that they had figured out a way to make our phones useful for figuring out if we were exposed to someone with coronavirus, you know, I was intrigued because they said that they were going to build it from the ground up with privacy in mind.

So we finally got the first of these in the US, in the state of Virginia called COVID Wise, and it came out earlier in August, and the moment it was there, I was like, we gotta test this, we gotta see if they really live up to the promises. And from everything we've been able to tell so far from our testing, I had thirty five colleagues at the Post who live in Virginia and they're all testing it for me. We

learned two things. First thing we learned is that it doesn't seem to be really much of a privacy risk here these apps. He's bluetooth to communicate two phones nearby. They don't collect your location, they don't send information about where you've been or her you've been in contact with to the government. Is actually a pretty clever system. We looked under the hood as well, just just a double check.

But they weren't sending out more information and then than they claimed, and they weren't those first thing we learned. The second thing we learned is we still don't know actually if this idea is going to work very well. Those thirty five Washington Post colleagues who are testing them, none of them got an exposure notification from this app over a candy period. Now that could be for many reasons. It could be like they were just being really good

at social distancing. It could mean that not many people around them we're using it, or it could mean that there's some problems with the idea that the phones can do this. But I don't think we were going to really figure that out. Is if a lot more people try it, And that's one of the interesting parts. Experts estimate that up to sixty of a population needs to be using these exposure apps for them to be effective. So in Virginia that means they need about five million

people to download it. But in its first week's covid wise got three hundred and eighty thousand downloads, so very far short of that number needed. But there's other things that are kind of become a problem with is this is in Virginia just by itself, but there's no big national system. So let's say you travel between states or just whatever, you come into contact with somebody else, maybe using a different app. It's not this COVID wise one, you know, it's not all going to work so seamlessly.

America's app exposure unification strategy suffers from stame of the some of the same problems as the rest of our coronavirus strategy, and that it's very local based, very state based, so as it's set up right now in the United States, every state health department would have to make their own version of one of these apps. The Feds have not expressed any interest, even though in other countries it is kind of the national government that's been working on these

kinds of apps. The good news is that about twenty states now have said that they're working on these kinds of apps. After Virginia, three more joined it, so we already have four out there in the wild. And there has been announced an effort that would make these apps sort of communicate with each other a little bit so that you could cross state borders with it. So that's a work in progress, but not there yet. How does the bluetooth aspect of it work, Because you said it

doesn't really necessarily spy on you. The data is anonymized as well, So tell us how that works, just so we can have peace of mind. With it at least this is kind of a fascinating idea that they use with this technology. So, first of all, Bluetooth most people might have associate with like headphones or like music play in your car, and that was really the reason this wireless technology was invented for these sort of very short

range transmissions. Well, turns out that Bluetooth also has the capability of being able to roughly tell how far away something is based on the strength of the signal. So these engineers at Apple and Google got together and they said, hey, what if we got made phones listened out for other phones that they're nearby, and record something about the ones that got six ft are closer. From Morgan fifteen minutes to develop this system that they pushed out into recent

updates to Android and to iOS. So if you've updated your phone software was somely you've got it on your phone already that they're able to in the background send out these little chirps a couple times a second that

just a very short anonymous codes. And the way it works basically is you know when you're near someone for sturing the period of time, your phone makes note of that anonymous code of the phone that you're in the year, and then if that person later has a coronavirus test and and has the disease, their health department can give them a code to enter into their app, and that will signal the system to let everybody else know who's come into contact with that patient's code that they should

go get tested for coronavirus as well. So throughout this process the government doesn't know where you were or even when or how you might have contracted the disease, and in fact, the government doesn't like that about it. They wish they had more information, and so that's been one

of the things that's made it so slow. But at no point can they really use it to track you as the interesting part to me, well, as you said, the biggest concern with these things is trust, and at least it's a little reassuring that they built these apps with that in mind, that your privacy is not really at risk, and the risk overall to anybody downloading these is pretty low. The biggest problem, it seems like, is

the widespread adoption. You need so many people to buy into this and then put themselves into the apple if they do have a positive test that other people can know. I mean, that's really going to be the biggest problem with all of these, but at least for now, you know, at least we have some type of working framework for this, and if we do get into these apps, it could

be a benefit for a lot of people. The biggest risk to you as an individual is you can get a false positive because maybe sometimes the bluetooth signals don't work super well and maybe you're picking up on the guy who lives next door who you've not actually been in contact with. So that is one thing that could happen. Worst case scenario there you take a COVID test you didn't need, Okay. The other risk really is that you could get false negatives, which means that you think you're

safe even if you've not been. And so definitely anybody installs one of these should take it with a grain of salt. Is not magic. It won't shield you from the virus, but it could give you some important information to help you know when you might need to take a test, and I think that's worth trying for everyone. Jeffrey Fowler tech calumnists at the way Shington Post, thank you very much for joining us. You bet, I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort

today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast