BROOKS CONNECT I O N S
A LU MN I P RO FILE
TIMO P L AT T ’ 73
A New Frontier A Brooksian’s contribution to the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of digital privacy. Timo Platt ’73 is the founder and chief executive officer of technology company PoKos Communications Corp. PoKos has found the solution to a pressing issue: How can public health authorities conduct effective, universal COVID-19 contact tracing through mobile phones without infringing on individuals’ privacy and data security? Dig in to your mobile phone’s settings, and chances are you’ll have the option to turn on an “Exposure Notification” setting. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology giants Apple and Google came together to help develop a national system for combating the spread of the coronavirus through mobile phone-based contact tracing. If you enable the “Exposure Notification” setting on your phone, your phone will exchange anonymous identifier beacons with other nearby phones — and, since people tend to keep their phones with them, the beacons serve as a proxy for other people you’ve been near. If you also download a contact tracing application, this record allows public health authorities and governments around the world to find and alert you if you have been in close contact with someone who has also enabled exposure notifications on their phone and has tested positive for COVID-19. “Contact tracing is one of the essential tools (in addition to mask-wearing and physical distancing) that governments have
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to fight the pandemic,” Timo says. “If we can automate part of it, and make it more accurate and realtime, we don’t impose the human resource burden and the delays in identification that would otherwise necessarily take place.” 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 highlyinfectious virus. A universal, automatic contact-tracing system powered by mobile phones naturally raises privacy concerns, and that’s where the PoKos technology comes in. “The most important thing is
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