Uploaded April 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Behind the global efforts to make a privacy-first coronavirus tracking app Safe Paths is MIT associate professor Ramesh Raskar. The hope is that smartphone tracking — combined with widespread testing — can help create a framework for cities to let people resume their lives.
MIT Safe Paths is a citizen-centric movement to develop free, open-source, privacy-by-design tools for citizens, public health officials, and larger communities to flatten the curve of COVID-19, reduce fear, and prevent a surveillance-state response to the pandemic.
Smartphones can help reduce the spread of the virus but any network analysis could cause unacceptable intrusion to privacy and human rights. We have crafted and deployed a privacy-first solution, Safe Paths, with serious consideration of technical and human factors https://safepaths.mit.edu/. The app is up and running and available for download in both IOS and Android app stores. The initiative has senior advisors that include Ron Rivest (Encryption), Yoshua Bengio (machine learning) and social physics (Sandy Pentland), as well as Kevin Esvelt and Kent Larson on the team. Early articles in Wired , MIT Tech Review, Popular Mechanics and WSJ articles summarize the direction of the effort. Implementation pilots are under development across the globe and in the US in various states.
In the early phases, the emphasis is on rapid iteration and deployment for solutions for epidemic tracking. In the later phases, the goal is building encrypted computational methods that can be useful in any future societal disruptions.
Behind the global efforts to make a privacy-first coronavirus tracking app Safe Paths is MIT associate professor Ramesh Raskar. The hope is that smartphone tracking — combined with widespread testing — can help create a framework for cities to let people resume their lives.
MIT Safe Paths is a citizen-centric movement to develop free, open-source, privacy-by-design tools for citizens, public health officials, and larger communities to flatten the curve of COVID-19, reduce fear, and prevent a surveillance-state response to the pandemic.
Smartphones can help reduce the spread of the virus but any network analysis could cause unacceptable intrusion to privacy and human rights. We have crafted and deployed a privacy-first solution, Safe Paths, with serious consideration of technical and human factors https://safepaths.mit.edu/. The app is up and running and available for download in both IOS and Android app stores. The initiative has senior advisors that include Ron Rivest (Encryption), Yoshua Bengio (machine learning) and social physics (Sandy Pentland), as well as Kevin Esvelt and Kent Larson on the team. Early articles in Wired , MIT Tech Review, Popular Mechanics and WSJ articles summarize the direction of the effort. Implementation pilots are under development across the globe and in the US in various states.
In the early phases, the emphasis is on rapid iteration and deployment for solutions for epidemic tracking. In the later phases, the goal is building encrypted computational methods that can be useful in any future societal disruptions.
