Indian-Origin Professor's App Tells You If You Have Crossed Paths With Someone Infected With COVID-19

According to Ramesh Raskar of the MIT Media Lab, his team has made an app that can curb the spread of COVID-19. What it does is to track the places users have been and who they have come in contact with. This information will then be shared with other users, all while preserving their privacy.

The app is named Private Kit: Safe Paths. It is open-sourced and free to use. It is the joint effort of Uber’s and Facebook’s software engineers, as well as experts at Harvard and MIT.

Privacy Concerns

According to WHO, to stop COVID-19 from spreading, it is important that governments identify those who have been infected and isolated them. In addition to that, those who they have seen and places they have traveled to should also be identified.

In China, this kind of information is pulled right from people’s phones but in other countries, this method can backfire so there needs to be another measure based on the same principle but still preserves people’s privacy.

How It Works

The app protects users’ data by sharing information in an encrypted form in its network without going through a central authority. So if a person using the app is confirmed to carry the virus, he or she can choose to share location data with health experts to make it public.

Raskar said that in this way, the authority needed to disinfect certain areas only, which is better than a total shutdown.

Will It Make A Difference?

How effective the app is depends on the number of people use it, this is why Ramesh Raskar and his team want as many people know about it as possible.

However, he also warned that Private Kit: Safe Paths can only tell people where the virus has been, not where it is heading to, so other preventative measures are still needed.

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