BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 22, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of UC Berkeley's Safe Campus Initiative, the university and Bitmark Inc. have partnered to launch Autonomy, a public health app that helps users understand how their local community is managing with COVID-19. In the process, Autonomy enables participants to control their rights to personal data submitted to the app, creating a safe privacy-first environment in which participants always opt-in.
The Safe Campus initiative is UC Berkeley's program to establish a system to keep the campus and surrounding communities safe to facilitate the eventual ramp-up of on-campus activities at the university. The study is led by a team of researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health—in partnership with University Health Services; the Innovative Genomics Institute; the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society; and the City of Berkeley health department.
Shelley Facente, the lead graduate student researcher for the Berkeley Safe Campus Initiative, said, "We are excited to make Autonomy available as an optional companion app for the initiative. Autonomy may help participants stay engaged by keeping them informed about the community around them without sacrificing personal privacy."
Safe Campus is estimating the incidence of new infections of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19); discovering who seems more likely to develop infection and why; developing strategies for how best to mitigate this risk; and allowing the campus to create effective systems to track potential infections. The ultimate goal of the study is to learn how to effectively prevent and control ongoing transmission as the school ramps up on-campus activities.
The Autonomy app completes the engagement loop for study participants: they contribute symptom and behavior data to the study and receive feedback through aggregated study data from the app. Autonomy also lets participants rate and review COVID-19 safety practices among local restaurants, café's, bookstores, and other shops.
"Everyone understands that sharing private health information at an aggregate level can help stop the spread of COVID-19. However, sacrificing personal privacy should never be part of the bargain. UC Berkeley was the perfect partner with whom to launch Autonomy because of their care for individuals' rights. We are excited to not only be part of this initiative with a world-class institution, but to also activate the local community in helping everyone get better in this pandemic," said Sean Moss-Pultz, Bitmark CEO and co-founder.
After the study concludes on September 30th, the app will be opened to all Berkeley residents and accessible as a web app on all Google Android and Apple iPhone devices, giving everyone access to the world-class public-health technology pioneered by UC Berkeley and Bitmark.
Headquartered in Taiwan, Bitmark started Autonomy after seeing the country respond successfully to COVID-19 through trusted collaboration between the local government and its citizens. Bitmark sought to bring this model of public health to the rest of the world and is launching Autonomy first with UC Berkeley to strengthen the collaboration between the university and its students, faculty, and staff.
The app, including its privacy and data practices, was fully reviewed and approved by UC Berkeley's Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Using Bitmark's digital rights protocol, participants can read, export, and delete their data from the Autonomy app at any time. Participants control their rights in Autonomy without the need of third parties acting as gatekeepers, including Bitmark Inc. - Bitmark's rights protocol operates decentralized through blockchain.
About UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley is a top-ranked public research university, and the oldest campus of the University of California system. It is known for everything from its Nobel Prize-winning faculty (8 of the current faculty members have this prestigious honor) to its role in birthing the Free Speech Movement to its commitment to a diverse student body, with 23% of incoming freshmen being first generation college students.
To learn more about the Safe Campus initiative: https://safecampus.covid.berkeley.edu/
About Bitmark
Bitmark's mission is to make data control accessible to everyone. Working across essential services of public health, life sciences, entertainment, and digital identity, Bitmark makes tools for individuals and organizations that extend the Bitmark rights protocol to their specific needs. Premiere institutions partnering with Bitmark include UC Berkeley, Pfizer, and KKBOX. Selected as a Top 100 Technology Pioneer in 2020 by the World Economic Forum, Bitmark is co-founded by serial entrepreneur Sean Moss-Pultz and backed by leading international institutional investors and the government of Taiwan.
Autonomy will be released publicly to the city of Berkeley on September 30th. Sign up to be the first to know: http://bit.ly/autonomysignup
Learn more about our work in #digitalrights: https://bitmark.com
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