ito - track infections, not people.

A privacy-first contact tracing app to fight SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens

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Description

ito is a privacy-first contact tracing app to fight SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens. It uses Bluetooth to anonymously recognize contact between users. If a user is reported as infected, the other users’ smartphones calculate the probability of an infection and provide them with appropriate recommendations of action.

The effort emerged from a grassroots movement during the German government's hackathon #WirVsVirus hackathon on March 20th, 2020. Its goal is to offer a simple solution for combatting the spread of infectious diseases. Since then, we have been joined by many other interested individuals, professionals and companies.

Join us

ito has more than 30 core members and a community of over 200 people. We are looking for support regarding contacts to health ministries internationally. We are looking for epidemiologists as well as COVID-19 tracing teams that are interested in testing, marketing and press outreach support as well as experts in iOS development, proximity detection, UX design and non-profit organizations.

Everyone is welcome to join our community on Discord.

Core Mechanisms

  • If users have been tested positive, they will receive a code from the health department that they can enter in the app. Their pseudonymized ID’s, which don’t correspond or correlate with their location will then be uploaded together with the verification of the positive test.
  • False positives are kept to a minimum by risk scoring with available data on the end user’s device. We are looking to further improve the risk scoring in collaboration with official institutions.
  • Devices regularly download the latest information at regular intervals to compare the data locally on their devices. When the device of a person who has been in contact with a reported user recognizes this pseudonymized ID, they will be informed - without the actual identity being revealed. Our focus is on data minimization, transparency and an easy-to-audit implementation to achieve maximum acceptance. Studies (e.g. this one from Oxford) have shown that the majority of the population must use the app to effectively prevent lockdowns. Therefore we prioritize transparency: Our entire solution and work process are open source and ready to be improved upon and reviewed by anyone right now.

Interoperability

  • Because the virus can spread globally and across borders, we need a secure bridge for users of different apps to be notified independent of the app they are using. Consequently, ito and other teams across the globe have formed the TCN coalition, a global alliance of privacy-focused open source projects working on decentralized tracing solutions. The result of this work is a privacy-first protocol that different countries and institutions can build their contact tracing apps on.
  • The TCN protocol is designed in such a way that it can be interoperable with other efforts such as the DP-3T protocol. We are currently exploring ways of making this possibility a reality.
  • We are exploring the impact the protocol recently proposed by Google and Apple has on our solution and we are looking to achieve interoperability with their framework.
  • Until their implementation is released, we will continue to work with an implementation of the TCN protocol and will provide a solution that is compatible with their framework.
  • Our React Native library that handles Bluetooth communication and the storage and fetching of TCNs is open-source and can easily be integrated into other apps by companies and other organizations to increase the adoption of contact tracing.
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