San Francisco, May 20: The chief executive officer (CEO) of Alphabet Inc and its subsidiary Google LLC Sundar Pichai on Wednesday said that COVID-19 Exposure Notification technology jointly built by Apple Inc and Google has been rolled out to public health agencies in support of their contact tracing efforts. The tech giants started working on contact tracing tool last month. Amazon Moves to Create Own Lab for Employee COVID-19 Tests.

"The COVID-19 Exposure Notification technology we built jointly with Apple is now available to public health agencies in support of their contact tracing efforts. Our goal is to empower them with another tool to help combat the virus while protecting user privacy," Pichai tweeted.

Sundar Pichai Tweet:

Apple CEO Tim Cook also said that this technology will help health officials with Coronavirus tracing. "Technology can help health officials rapidly tell someone they may have been exposed to COVID-19. Today the Exposure Notification API we created with Google is available to help public health agencies make their COVID-19 apps effective while protecting user privacy," Cook tweeted.

Tim Cook Tweet:

The Android and iOS users will get to decide opt-in or not to Exposure Notifications. "If a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, it is up to them whether or not to report that in the public health app. User adoption is key to success and we believe that these strong privacy protections are also the best way to encourage use of these apps," said the companies.

The API will allow PHAs to define what constitutes an exposure event and will allow them to determine the number of exposure events an individual has had.

"The API will allow PHAs to factor transmission risk of positive cases into their definition of an exposure event and a combination of the API and data that users voluntarily choose to input into the app allows PHAs to contact exposed users", said Apple and Google.

Exposure Notification has the specific goal of rapid notification, which is especially important to slowing the spread of the disease with a virus that can be spread asymptomatically.

On April 10, Google and Apple announced a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing, with user privacy and security core to the design.

Both the companies provided developers with new resources to help them make exposure notification apps, including user interfaces (UI) and sample code for both iOS and Android.

(With IANS Inputs)

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 20, 2020 11:51 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).