Today, the State of California approved a new, voluntary pilot program that uses Apple and Google smartphone technology to help rapidly reduce the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks. The program is designed to quickly notify individuals when a COVID-19 exposure may have occurred. The program will launch later this month on the UC San Diego campus, followed by UC San Francisco, for students and employees who elect to opt-in to the voluntary program.
The project was conceived with the understanding that many tools are needed to control the spread of COVID-19. Smartphone technology can be used effectively to help amplify the efforts of contact tracers, as well as individuals who anonymously help notify the public of potential exposures. The current manual notification process is labor intensive and may be supplemented with smartphone technology.
Privacy First
The smartphone notification project uses a privacy-first approach. Users may decide whether they want to share a verified positive test result with the phone app and then determine whether they want to share that result with other users. Location information is never collected and user identities are strictly confidential. Neither Apple nor Google have access to this information.
Participation is Voluntary
As you know, our Return to Learn strategy includes three pillars: risk mitigation, viral detection, and intervention. This new smartphone technology offers our campus community an additional, voluntary tool to help detect and prevent the spread of the virus. We would like to invite all of our students, faculty, and staff to consider opting in to increase the possibility of quick detection of the virus on campus to avoid potential outbreaks. You may choose to opt-out any time.
In the near future, members of the UC San Diego campus community will receive an email invitation to participate in this important pilot project.
As data is collected, state and university epidemiologists will review the results of the pilot to determine how to optimize the smartphone-based technology and whether it should be rolled out more broadly.
Who is Eligible
Eligible participants include all UC San Diego students, staff and faculty. The pilot is supported by the UC San Diego Return to Learn initiative.
To learn more, visit the information pages from Google and Apple.
Thank You
Our Return to Learn plan and this collaboration between Google, Apple, and the UC San Diego team reflects many hours of collaboration, creative solutions modeling and intense commitment to identifying new and better ways to keep our community safe.
In particular, we would like to acknowledge the hard work, vision and dedication of our Information Technology Services teams. Each of you exemplifies the bold spirit and commitment to innovation that are hallmarks of our university.
To all of our students, faculty, and staff for your continued commitment to the ongoing health and safety of our UC San Diego community, thank you.
