FAQ

Four sentence elevator pitches (Needs Review):

• Zerobase enables local communities to establish a first line of defense against outbreaks in a way that’s private, easy to use, and helps mitigate the manual issues involved in exposure tracing and individualized testing triage.

• How do you effectively contain a pandemic? Testing and Tracing. If a community has sufficient testing resources the burden on tracing is reduced. If a community does not have sufficient testing resources, tracing becomes exponentially harder. Zerobase performs tracing instantly for public health officials in a way that's easy and private for communities to deploy and use, raising a critical cornerstone of containment.

• When a person tests positive for novel coronavirus the race begins. Locating everyone the patient interacted with, and those that interacted with them. Zerobase enables public health agencies a way to recreate those interactions in a way that’s private and instant.

Can Google do this at a huge scale with their location history? Is the differentiator for Zerobase the privacy component?

Yes, Google can track the geo-coordinates of your movements specifically. But there are a few operational drawbacks:

1. They do not necessarily have all data on who intersected with your location. While they might have huge coverage (Android phones, Google maps), there will be a few that intersect at your location which would slip through the trace coverage. Zerobase is different in the sense that all users are onboarded immediately at participating locations.
2. Big data vs. Overwhelming data. It is most likely that your second to second geocoordinates are not of interest to public health agencies. For example, if you walked out into the woods alone, from a public health perspective that might not be entirely relevant. The Zerobase data structure of location-based “check-ins” is much more manageable and “query-able” than full geolocation history.
3. Google may not have a direct line of communication to everyone who may have been exposed. Having this direct notification system will be key. All users onboard with notifications through Zerobase.
4. TLDR; Too much data, too much computation and a few might slip through the cracks breaking virtual containment estimates

The major drawback and differentiator is most likely privacy. The problem becomes compounded when we start to involve HIPPA GDPR, etc. Similar measures were proposed in Germany to request geo coordinate historical data from telecommunications providers, however, there has been significant push back.

Having privacy at the forefront is critical to establish trust and community buy-in. Google, Facebook might have used up that social capital as of late. Zerobase offers an alternative that is private, but effective in the sense that public health agencies can effectively issue individualized instructions at scale without necessarily knowing who is behind the ID. Big data without big brother.

What are the best sources of massive personal location data that exist? Google location history, maybe FB checkins (probably not a real thing), scraping instagram location tags, etc. How would you build a dataset of everywhere everyone has gone, assuming you don’t have privacy concerns?

In Germany it seems telecommunications data would be the best source of personal location data. High coverage. In the United States Verizon used to sell personal geolocation data, but the practice has come under intense scrutiny. However even with such a large dataset you start to run into operational issues described in the Why Not Google section above. The dataset needs to be readily accessible by public health officials. If it’s not immediate, more specialization (aka only engineers can run complex geofencing queries on a huge dataset) will only delay response without a significantly improved query result. We need the feedback loop between testing and tracing to be tight.

What does it mean for individuals who go into a store? Do they have to have an app? Know how to scan a qr code? Just go to the zerobase website and show the shop owner their qr code?

No App, no installation, no signup required. If it's hard to use, people won’t use it. We estimate that 80% of current smartphones’ default camera applications have QR scanning ability (we will compile this list). For example, all an iPhone user would need to do is open their camera app, point at the qr and click the prompt that appears. Once they click the prompt they will be redirected to the zerobase website and automatically assigned a unique id. Granted even this pattern will need some training or instructions posted at the storefront or explained by a store employee. Additionally there will need to be a change in the paradigm of expectations when entering a location. In China that paradigm has already changed, it’s expected that you’ll have your temperature read at any location you enter.

If their default camera app does not have QR scanning ability, the zerobase.io website offers scanning functionality as a fallback. The drawback being that would have to navigate to zerobase.io and click scan from the dropdown menu.

For those who entirely do not have a functional camera or smartphone (children, elderly), someone with a smartphone can generate an “Alternative ID” for them and print it out. The store employee can then scan the physical qr code. However smartphones will ultimately gain the highest stratification.

Scanned or be scanned the paradigm does not really matter as long as the database registers a contact point. It’s still up to debate whether we want to ask for more information from locations (stores) since their IDs are indistinguishable from individual IDs (everything is just Device ID). But the system still works even without this designation. For example IDs that have lots of scans and no scan action will probably be a location and then you infer the individual intersections during the location from then.