How Apple, Google’s contact tracing API project started

Apple and Google announced a historic partnership in April to help develop a solution that can be deployed by governments and health care agencies across the globe to track the spread of the Covid-19. While the world got to know about the companies’ plans on April 10, the efforts to develop a solution that would track the spread of the virus without compromising on users’ privacy started much earlier. Now, a profile of Swiff data scientists have offered us deep insights as to how this project came into being.

A profile by Neue Zurcher Zeitung (via Apple Insider) explains how VMWare’s founding CTO Edouard Bugnion along with epidemiologist Marcel Salathe decided to work on developing a solution to track the spread of infection in a pandemic without tracking the infected patient via GPS (as was being used by many apps deployed in various Asian countries).

Bugnion got in touch with Spanish data protection expert Carmela Troncoso to develop an app that didn’t use GPS for tracing the spread of the infection. The team quickly realised that Bluetooth Low Energy would be a data-saving option as it wouldn’t rely on the exact location of the user but it would use anonymized IDs and signal strength to determine how close a user is to an infected person without compromising on users’ privacy.

Soon, other researchers join their effort and speed up the development process. However, they quickly realise that they need Apple’s support to take the project a step further as the company deploys strict restrictions on the usage of Bluetooth in iPhone. The Swiss team tries to contact Apple’s team in California. After a lot of efforts Bugnion manages to get hold of Apple head of Health Strategic Initiatives Myoung Cha, who reported to COO Jeff Williams.

By April 5 Apple was willing to invest resources in their app. But they realised that in order to make the system interoperable, they had to bring Google on board. Soon after Google came on board and together the two companies announced their joint efforts on April 10.

The fact that we, as an international team, had such an impact on these giants and the fact that we became one of their main partners is also an expression of the high-quality computer science research in Switzerland," Bugnion told the publication.