Tracing the contacts of those who have Covid-19 is an important element of stopping its spread and making it safer to re-open our society and economy. Manual tracing is hard and error-prone, so the tech industry is trying to help with smartphones. We dig into how the technology works.
There are almost as many different approaches to how that might work as there are countries. But they fall into a few broad categories in terms of which technologies they use, how much data they store, and how they protect privacy. Here’s a look at some of the current and planned efforts, with a focus on those being piloted for deployment in the US.