CovidTracker hi privacy low invasive geo tracking tool

Example of anonimyzed data taken from Maps location history

Preamble

I knew of EUVsVirus from a friend only Friday 24. Excuse me for the form, please focus on my proposal content. Thanks.

Inspiration

This project idea was inspired by frustration observing how the covid emergency was handled in many western countries, mainly Lombardy-Italy, where I live, vs South Korea. South Korea employed a good mix of medicine, good social habits (distance, face masks, etc.) and software technologies to avoid the spreading, as result they had limited damages with mild restrictions. In Italy instead since they had no support from technology, they had to completely lockdown the country and rely uniquely on the medical workforce to tackle the epidemic. The result unfortunately is much worse than Korea. I tried to imagine a quick solution to track infected people, compatible with the short time available for the emergency and the democratic culture of EU countries, very different from Asia. Bear with me for the rest of this document to know the details

What it does

My tracker idea project would reveal a precise and detailed list of locations where a newly infected person has been in the past weeks. Since as I said there is little time available, I thought of a shortcut/hack to achieve this result without building a new solution from scratch. The idea is to use an existing app already widely used by most of smartphone owners: Google Maps. Maps allow to keep an history location of all the places we have visited. The list is very detailed and precise and Google allow us to easily download it anytime and for any purpose we want. My idea is to recommend to anyone to enable the location history so when someone get the infection, he can share the past few weeks of it with health authorities and allow analysis, selective lockdowns and population alerts. The list can be easily anonymized with a small open source application as shown in this example picture: and it could be used to build an interactive map where other citizens can check against their location history to see if there are location/time matches. This would give some sort of “visibility” to the invisible enemy. Authorities could inspect/disinfect places at risk and recommend a self-quarantine to those who were in the same place/time of infected people. I would like to highlight the social reception of such a solution. In Europe we have a different culture from Asian countries and majority of citizen would not like to install an app made from the government with the specific purpose to track them, no matter what technical reassurances. I have already witnessed an enormous hostility on twitter against announcements of new apps of this kind. Choosing a cooperative approach, where giving data is volunteer based through a trusted app used (and tested) by billions of users since many years could work better. However, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive and can coexist. Integrating two different channels might make collected data even more reliable.

How I built it

I didn’t really build the final solution. I have built and tested separate units that will compose the solution and I am quite confident that this solution could work and help population. However, to complete the solution I need the help of other people, not really in the software field, where a I have a long 30+ years’ experience, but more in the communication and public relation field. However, having more developers on board is welcome and recommended, just not crucial in the very first stage where I can build a lot even if alone.

Challenges I ran into

I tried to propose this solution to the Italian ministry of innovation and on twitter Italian audience. While I received many compliments and even an interview from a famous person in the Italian innovation scene, nobody really wanted to go on and support me to create a complete solution. I guess in part it is difficult to be heard when a lot of noise and panic goes around because of an emergency and in part because I am an independent software developer with no influential relationship. In my life I built many solutions that made the success of companies I worked for but I was mainly behind the scenes focusing on a scientific work with little time for public relations. I hope that this EUVsVirus event will give me an opportunity to be heard and to find other people that could help to put this solution in practice so that it can help the population.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finding a solution requiring short time and financial resources to implement. I guess it’s ideal in the emergency situation we are living.

What I learned

Keep thinking outside the box. I see lot of developers wanting to build from scratch convoluted solutions, many based on Bluetooth proximity protocol which proved to fail in Singapore and other countries, not yet mature and requiring long time and tests to implement. I guess these developers are so much in love with technology and their dream to be the next tech celebrity that they lose the pragmatism of focusing on the problem to solve instead of obsessing with technology or fame.