(COVID Trace Image)

It turns out that two weeks of self isolation and social distancing is a good amount of time to build an app — especially if that app’s intention is to help in the fight against COVID-19.

Coronavirus Live Updates: The latest COVID-19 developments in Seattle and the world of tech

But the non-stop work of three Seattle software engineers may not see the light of day due to restrictions Apple has placed in the App Store on COVID-19-related apps that deal with private data.

COVID Trace is the creation of Dudley Carr, Wes Carr and Josh Gummersall, three tech veterans with prior experience at Moz, Google, Uber and elsewhere. The scalable, automated, contact tracing app — with a heavy emphasis on protecting user privacy — is intended to use cell phone data to warn people if they have been exposed to COVID-19. It compares user location data with locations of potential exposure.

Dudley Carr.

The calls for digital tracing, already used in countries such as Singapore and South Korea, are getting louder among some in the U.S., including Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who is leading an effort called NextTrace.

The COVID Trace app is built and ready to roll out, but Apple is limiting COVID-19 apps primarily to universities, hospitals or other established organizations and non-profits, according to those who have heard from the company.

“When you spend two weeks working on building this idea and you basically hurry up and you run into this wall, it is frustrating,” said Dudley Carr, the former CTO at Moz, the Seattle search engine optimization company. “But it also makes so much sense because if you think about the number of people who are trying to potentially reach users, there’s so much potential to mislead and exploit.”

GeekWire reached out to Apple for comment on its policy regarding COVID-19-related apps and the company pointed to this guidance for developers.

In separate blog posts on the COVID Trace website, Carr has shared a good deal about the app, introducing the concept, laying out details about the architecture, and offering an in-depth look at what steps have been taken to make privacy a core component.

Carr called China’s mass surveillance of cell phone data and apps to figure out who might be infected a “distasteful” prospect to the majority of Americans, even if they are in the midst of a pandemic.

“We’ve been fairly privacy minded individuals,” Carr told GeekWire. “When I started thinking about contact tracing, the idea kind of emerged that if we are primarily able to do it on the phone, that is likely to be a really good way to protect people’s privacy. If data doesn’t leave your phone the ability to exploit that or have there be a way for that data to be mismanaged goes down significantly.”

COVID Trace would only ask for data that it needs and hold onto that data for as little time as possible. Data that is shared publicly to alert others is anonymized and devoid of unique identifiers.

Running into the Apple roadblock has pushed Carr toward doing outreach for the past five days, contacting medical professional friends or people he worked with at Google who might have answers.

“We’re trying to get the word out to people, but all the people who we could potentially partner with and work with are super swamped at the front lines,” Carr said. “I think this is important, but it’s hard to get their attention right now.”

While the plan now would be for COVID Trace to work with self-reported information, Carr said it would be fairly straightforward to work with testing facilities in a way that is “very low touch” so they could have verified data side by side with self-reported data.

But each day that passes is another day without the collection of vital information to stop the spread of novel coronavirus. Even if Apple and Google let apps like his in, Carr said it’s not like those companies are going to help out by providing several weeks worth of data about where people have been.

“People aren’t really realizing at the moment that there’s not only a delay in terms of getting the stuff out, there’s going to be a delay in terms of utility because it doesn’t have the retrospective data,” he said. “And I think that is a serious issue that is going to be one of those things that by the time you realize it’s a problem the solutions are going to be not particularly palatable again.”

In the meantime, Apple has released its own app and website, in partnership with the CDC, meant to serve as a COVID-19 screening tool and set of resources for people to stay informed and protect their health.

More rejections

(Antidote Image)

COVID Trace isn’t alone in running up against problems getting into the App Store.

Antidote is another Seattle-built app, created over the course of 11 long days by Philipp Cannons and his team at Asgard Analytics, which received the same rejection as COVID Trace because it did not come from an accredited institution.

Similar to Singapore’s TraceTogether app, Antidote relies on contact tracing through Bluetooth and promises anonymous data collection

“If someone reports being sick, everyone who’s come in their proximity will be notified,” the app website asserts. “Alternatively, you can notify everyone you’ve come in contact with by reporting being sick.”

(FaceAlert Photo)

Andrew Munsell, a software engineer in Seattle who works for Amazon, submitted his free app for approval two weeks ago and after being held up in the review process and going back and forth with Apple, he finally heard Thursday that he’d been rejected.

Munsell’s FaceAlert is an iPhone and Apple Watch app that uses machine learning to detect when you touch your face and reminds you to avoid doing so — germ-fighting advice that has been shared widely during the pandemic.

Apple was apparently not comfortable with FaceAlert taking “health measurements that the device was not designed to support,” according to correspondence Munsell received. There are no references to coronavirus or COVID-19 and Munsell removed anything alluding to “healthy habits.” He contends all his app does is measure arm position.

Munsell said he even emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday, which may be why he got an actual phone call from Apple later in the day in which he said the company told him it was not interested in accepting the liability of having an app on their platform that trains people to avoid touching their face.

“I feel very strongly towards this because I believe that this app could help millions of Apple Watch users around the world,” Munsell said.

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