How We Feel, a crowdsourced COVID-19 symptom tracking app that respects privacy, launched Thursday to provide more data on the spread of the coronavirus.

Pinterest Inc. Chief Executive Ben Silbermann partnered with researchers from Harvard University, Stanford University and Feeding America to produce the app, now available for iOS and Android devices. It asks people to take 30 seconds each day to submit information on how they feel – healthy or otherwise. Other data that the app collects includes age and ZIP code, but no other information is requested or collected.

Users can opt to also share their symptoms if they are sick and also information on what they are doing to prevent the spread of the disease, such as social distancing or self-isolation. Pinterest said the data will only be used in support of research tracking the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.

“Each health check-in may feel like a small act, but together they’ll make a huge difference for researchers like myself who are trying to understand this outbreak and develop intervention measures to control it,” Xihong Lin, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard University, said in a statement published by NBC News. “The data gives us a bird’s eye view of COVID-19 that helps us predict regions on the brink of an outbreak.”

Current research collaborators who will gain access to the data from the How We Feel app include the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Broad Institute of MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.

Numerous efforts to collect data and track the spread of COVID-19 have begun in the past two months. These include numerous apps and public data pools such as a depository from The New York Times on GitHub. Some governments around the world have also begun to roll out their own apps, such as Hangzhou in China creating a heath code app in February, Singapore launched a location-tracking app in March, and European nations are developing one right now.

How We Feel seeks to set itself apart from other efforts to track and collect data on the COVID-19 pandemic by protecting the privacy of users. Other apps, especially those that use passive collection techniques such as a phone’s geolocation information, have been under fire by privacy advocates thanks to concerns about how the data could be used.

To aid in protecting the privacy of users, the How We Feel Project collaborated with Gary King from Harvard from the University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s Privacy Insights Project. According to Pinterest, King specializes in technologies designed to make data available with protecting identities of individual subjects using what is called “differential privacy.”

Aiming to entice more users to download and use the app, Pinterest has allied with Feeding America, a U.S.-based hunger-relief organization. For every download of the app, and the first submission of data, How We Feel will donate one meal to people in need, up to 10 million meals.

Image: How We Feel