The Linux Foundation is helping to create new contact tracking apps around the world

The Linux Foundation wants to help health authorities to combat the COVID-19 pandemic through open source technologies. The Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) initiative is now developing two contact tracking projects based on the APIs developed by Google and Apple: COVID Shield and COVID Green.

The non-profit organization explains that the initiative wants to bring together a global community of technological companies, health authorities, epidemiology experts and programmers to face the pandemic that continues to plague the world. LFPH also has a partnership with Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent and VMware.

COVID Shield is being implemented in Canada and in some US states. The application was developed by a team of volunteers made up of 40 developers from Canadian Shopify and Canadian Digital Services.

COVID Shield

The technological solution is not available for download by the public, but is only used as a starting point for the creation of tracking applications by the local health authorities.

The application is programmed to work via Bluetooth, collecting and sharing identification codes with smartphones that are nearby and that have installed it. If diagnosed with COVID-19, a user can alert other people and share their data anonymously.

COVID Green is based on the application developed by NearForm as part of the Irish Government's pandemic response. In just two weeks, COVID Tracker was adopted by a third of the country's adults. Now, the code that underlies its creation can be used by other countries to develop their own contact tracking applications.

LFPH has also developed an interactive dashboard that allows you to monitor the emergence and development of new technological contact tracking solutions around the world.

Linux Foundation Public Health Landscape credits: LFPH

In Portugal, the STAYAWAY COVIDj application is being tested with a large group of users, with more than 13 thousand people being contacted to install the application. As the application launch date approached, Associação D3 – Defense of Digital Rights recently highlighted its concern and concern for the lack of transparency in its development.

The Association also created siterastreamento.pt to help understand the contact tracking solutions and to clarify the decision to install them or not, since it considers that a large part of the questions about the application being developed by INESC TEC, financed with public funds by FCT and officially supported by the Government and the General Directorate of Health, are not answered.