Trace Together

= "a mobile application that assists with contact tracing produced by the Government of Singapore and the Singapore Ministry of Health (MoH)".

URL = https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/

Description

BY HENRY DE VALENCE:

"One incredibly exciting technological development is TraceTogether, a mobile application that assists with contact tracing produced by the Government of Singapore and the Singapore Ministry of Health (MoH). The app creates a temporary ID by encrypting a user ID to a MoH-owned public key, and then broadcasts the temporary ID over Bluetooth. This temporary ID is refreshed at regular intervals, so that it cannot be used as a long-term identifier for third-party tracking. Nearby mobile devices running the app log all observed broadcasts. If a user later develops symptoms and tests positive for COVID-19, they can upload their log of contacts to the MoH, who functions as a trusted third party that can decrypt the log entries and notify all of that user’s contacts of potential COVID-19 exposure. The MoH promises to use the log data only for the purposes of contact notification.

While this application is not perfectly privacy-preserving, it is far superior to location-tracking, and reveals personal information only upon infection, rather than using the threat of COVID-19 as a justification to build permanent surveillance infrastructure, or exposing patient data to the public. Public health requires public trust, and the developers should be congratulated for building privacy protections into the system." (https://www.zfnd.org/blog/decentralized-contact-tracing/)