MIT-developed Smartphone App Could Reopen the USA
The economy is closed. Tens of millions of Americans are living under voluntary house arrest. And that is the easy part. The hard part will be getting back to normal. That will require real innovation.
To help get society back and running normally, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a smartphone app to track the spread of COVID-19.
But this isn’t the Big Brother surveillance we’ve seen in other countries. The twist is where the data is shared, with whom and how.
It’s a way out of disruptive and blanketed shutdowns. And, unlike options used abroad, it comes without the sacrifice of your personal privacy.
Those shutdowns are killing the economy. Ten million Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits during the last two weeks of March. According to a MarketWatch story, Wall Street analysts are bracing for an additional 5 million new applicants this week. Some worry the ranks of the unemployed will reach Great Depression levels by summer.
To get in front of the economic calamity, Washington lawmakers rushed to pass a $2 trillion relief package last month. Senators voted unanimously to provide aid to small businesses, airlines and millions of hourly workers. It was the largest economic stimulus package in history, and it might not be enough.
Unlike previous recessions where key parts of the economy remained vibrant, COVID-19 has shuttered most businesses that require worker density.
This is exactly the problem MIT researchers want to squash.
Let me introduce you to Private Kit: Safe Paths, an app that offers a unique solution to the coronavirus crisis. In essence, it’s the ultimate hybrid of technology and privacy.
Private Kit uses Bluetooth GPS location data to collect digital markers from nearby phones each time a person goes out in public. If a person tests positive and they choose to share that information, the app sends notifications to all digital markers that have been collected without revealing personal information of the infected person.
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The app is a collaboration between MIT, Harvard and engineers at Uber (UBER) and Facebook (FB) working in their free time. It works with both iPhones and Androids and user privacy is ensured throughout the process: The information gets encrypted and is never sent to any central database.
Pictured below is a screenshot of what the application will look like on a smartphone.
Rasmesh Raskar, a team leader at MIT Media Lab, says the granular tracking will help fine tune COVID-19 hotspots. In addition to fighting the spread of the coronavirus, the app should determine places where the threat is limited. There is plenty of reason to believe this information could help reopen the economy.
The New York Times reported that Chinese citizens were required to download a smartphone app in the wake of their COVID-19 crisis in January. Authorities used the data to trace contacts, quarantine and ban travel. The concept is extremely similar, although the Chinese version was less concerned about privacy.
South Korean officials were equally aggressive. They used smartphone data to track, test and isolate everyone thought to have come in contact with the coronavirus.
And the success of this tracking is clear. Although South Korea and the United States reported the first COVID-19 case on the same day, new cases there have declined 90% in the last 40 days. And active cases declined to only 3,400, versus a staggering 365,000 in the United States.
Today, South Korean restaurants and shops are open. The economy is back to work, while the U.S. is currently in shambles.
Clearly, the United States can’t stay closed forever. Officials in the Trump administration are talking about reopening the economy soon. On Tuesday, Steven Mnuchin told Fox Business that parts of the country have not been impacted by the coronavirus outbreak. The treasury secretary reiterated a longstanding White House talking point that it’s time for people to get back to work. Yet, critics say there has not been enough testing to know where the pockets of infection are located.
That’s where Private Kit could help. The software hits the right note between more authoritarian Asian governments and western reservations about privacy. That’s a major reason why it has lots of potential. Private Kit is voluntary and open source.
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The deluge of data from a widely used tracing app could be treasure trove in the wrong hands. Keeping the software free from large corporate and government interests is a big plus.
The most important advantage, however, is the freedom from ignorance that Private Kit provides. The COVID-19 crisis is shutting down the economy because we don’t know where and when it will strike next. Widespread testing would solve this problem but building the scale to process those tests could take many months.
Contact tracing, using devices most of us already own, speeds up the process. It’s a real innovation that could put millions of people back to work.
Best wishes,
Jon D. Markman
