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It was reported today that the Canadian province of Alberta introduced the first coronavirus contact tracking app in Canada called today. ABTraceTogether. Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, first referenced the contact tracking application at the province’s April 23 COVID-19 briefing.
Dr. Hinshaw said at the time that “The benefit of this app is to accelerate the collection of information to support the contact localization work that our public health workers are already doing. This is simply taking our decades-long public health approach in the 21st century and by providing more efficient means for Albertans to work with public health in finding case contacts. “
ABTraceTogether it is based on the source code of a similar application used in Singapore. Using that code, the province, with the help of Deloitte partners, created the app for use in Alberta. The cost of the application was $ 625,000.
The use of the application is completely voluntary; no one is required to download ABTraceTogether.
The interesting thing about learning today is that Tracing 2.0 is coming to the market soon based on the Apple-Google contact tracking system, according to Deloitte.
Deloitte further noted that “Apple and Google have announced a set of tools developed jointly to include Bluetooth-based contact tracking directly in their mobile operating systems. These enhancements will allow the full power of Bluetooth-based contact exchange without team commitments. TraceTogether were forced to do (such as requiring the iOS app to remain in the foreground continuously).
The Apple / Google contact tracking crypto specification is more sophisticated than BlueTrace. The addition of a daily tracking key provides a valuable limitation of the “blast radius” in case a user’s application or keys are compromised.
The keys are generated locally on each device, exchanging better decentralization and privacy for greater complexity and battery consumption.
The handling of the contact correlation is also quite different. The mobile proximity identifier, equivalent to the BlueTrace temporary identification, is derived from the daily tracking key and the “day number” (days since the UNIX era). When an infected patient uploads their tracking history, they actually upload their own daily tracking keys, which are then made public. Other apps regularly get the list of new diagnostic keys, recalculate mobile proximity IDs, and check if they came in contact with any of those IDs.
As a second-generation tracking technology, the Apple approach | Google has learned from its predecessors and has significantly better scaling, privacy, and crypto qualities.
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