Apple and Google are working on coronavirus contact-tracing technology for iOS and Android

[LutherBlisset]

@xeni, and others: have a look here for an interesting discussion about the technical aspects of bluetooth proximity measurements.

Bluetooth for contact tracing COVID-19

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-10/apple-google-bring-covid-19-contact-tracing-to-3-billion-people Any engineers around here who can tell me how they are going to solve the distance measurement problem? (Also, if they are not going approach this massively differently than usual, i.e. if they are not going to go FOSS with this and be more transparent and more reliable than transparent aluminium, how is this not going to end up as a security nightmare? Ok, please don’t answer, I …

Bottom line: doesn’t compute, yet.

ETA: most relevant post, by @Aciantis:

Bluetooth for contact tracing COVID-19

So, I have worked some on problems with distance measurements using radio-frequency signals. There are three basic approaches for this problem: 1: Triangulation using the relative phase of reception on three antennas with a common reference clock. This will get you the direction of the transmitter, and if you have three such systems with known locations you can localise the transmitter perfectly. This requires specialised equipment with fixed installation points. It also suffers from multi-pat…