Fortune August 17, 2020
With COVID-19 cases climbing across the U.S. and manual contact tracing efforts to stem the spread of the disease faltering, officials are turning to a tech solution that nearly four dozen countries have adopted: digital contact tracing apps.
In the coming weeks, over 20 states and localities in the U.S. plan to roll out COVID-19 contact tracing apps based on a model developed by Google and Apple—one that relies on a phone’s Bluetooth signal to exchange digital handshakes with other devices in a six-foot range.
The data collected from the app is stored within a user’s phone, rather than on a government server, and only when an app user is diagnosed with COVID-19 are they asked by health authorities...