A New Frontier

Mobile phones are key to the contact-tracing effort, Timo says, because they've become so universal. The Pew Research Center's data confirms how common mobile phones are: By February 2021, 85 percent of American adults owned a mobile phone, up from 35 percent a mere 10 years ago. A contact-tracing system, Timo says, that operates in the background and across devices regardless of their manufacturer — that would allow an Apple iPhone to recognize and communicate with a Samsung Android device, for example — should prove extremely helpful to slow the growth of any new highly-infectious virus.

PoKos's exposure notification technology ("ENT") helps ensure that the data collected during contact tracing is protected and anonymous. PoKos's ENT assigns a random "key" — a multi-digit code — to phones as they move with their owners. The phones use Bluetooth to transmit a beacon derived from their key to nearby phones and receive the beacons from phones near them.

Digital privacy and anonymity are paramount. Each phone's key is unique and changes every 15 minutes. The beacons each phone generates and receives are stored on the phone itself. If a user receives a COVID-19 diagnosis, they can opt-in to uploading their own location beacons to a server hosted by the local public health authority. "By virtue of the way the beacons are encrypted, the public health authority cannot sell, share or mine that data for any other purpose," Timo says, "and the beacons are shared on an opt in basis by the user." Even if the data does fall into malevolent hands, Timo says, the beacons do not reveal any health or other personal information, are "not traceable to a person," and even with respect to a phone, "are traceable only to the beacons stored on that phone, rather than the phone itself."

In July 2020, the Association of Public Health Laboratories reported that it would support the national enterprise by host- ing on its secure servers the keys uploaded by users who have opted in to the system. Timo notes the importance of that development, which allows for different public health authorities to use the same data across state and local borders.

It lets users benefit from exposure notifications even as they travel. "What we're about at PoKos is providing infrastructure capabilities to ensure privacy and anonymity in communications," Timo concludes. "We're under the hood; we're not an app, and nobody's going to see PoKos's name anywhere on contact tracing. But if they really go in and see how it all works, they'll see PoKos inside, trying to make digital communications a better, safer place."

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