As some of you might know, I’ve been working with my friends Victoria Lee, Isaiah Becker-Mayer, Jo Sanders on Covid Watch, a decentralized, privacy-first, contact tracing solution led by Tina White and others.
Widespread testing and Contact tracing is one of the best options we have for moving things towards the normal again. The key issue with other contact tracing solutions is privacy, risk of surveillance and abuse, or lack of adoption / usefulness.
Covid Watch came out of Stanford, Waterloo et al and is the inventor of the first decentralized, anonymous Bluetooth protocol that is now used by the global TCN coalition. It also advocated to Apple & Google to make this a part of their OSes and that’s exactly what is happening soon. We already have an app ready to go based on an OS update that is coming to all phones soon.
Covid Watch is in very advanced talks with public health departments around the world and is about to start pilots to evaluate the tracing protocol in the field and to identify last mile integration with health department and manual contact tracing systems. We are one of the only solutions that so far along that preserves full anonymity, while still scaling contact tracing; and our solution puts the user in full control of every aspect. e.g. it is similar to how your phone can keep track of your daily steps, but you have full control on which app can access it and can also see transparently exactly what that data contains at any time.
Covid Watch is fully open source and is a non-profit.
100+ volunteers are already working on this and we need more people to join. Things are moving very fast and the growth is more exponential than any startup I have ever seen. If you have the time / capacity / interest, please check out the link below
https://www.covid-watch.org/join
