10% Of Coloradans Are Already Using The COVID-19 Tracking App. Will It Help? – Colorado Public Radio

The more people who are in this, the more people who add their phone to the fight against COVID, the more protection we all get, she said. So everyone should do it. And the sky's the limit or the population is the limit.

The service exchanges tokens with nearby phones that also have the program running and are within six feet of one another for at least ten minutes. The app uses push notifications and Bluetooth to share the token information, which do not contain personal identifying information, according to the health department.

If a person tests positive for COVID-19, theyre able to share that information through the app which will then notify others about possible exposure, but will not indicate who the person is with COVID-19.

People cant lie about their test results, Tuneberg said. After receiving a positive test result they will get a link from a public health professional that allows them to access the app, answer a few questions and the app will notify people who may have been exposed. That link only works once.

Because of privacy concerns, Tuneberg said the state has opted out of collecting certain data points like user locations or demographic information.

We felt it was much more important to protect privacy first and have less data on the state's side because we really want more people to enable the service, and the research we did found that the less tracking data, actually no tracking data, was the way to facilitate the highest level of adoption, Tuneberg said. It was a trade-off we really wanted because we'd rather save lives than have great data.

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10% Of Coloradans Are Already Using The COVID-19 Tracking App. Will It Help? - Colorado Public Radio