Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/07/25/smartphone-contact-tracing-has-failed-everywhere/

by zdw • 6 years ago

172 195 6 years ago

Contact tracing has unfortunately also failed as in "is buggy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947323

To be clear, I've installed the tracing app, having the idea that it can only help to isolate hotspots, which however is mainly the health authorities' task. And 16+ million downloads (of how many eligible smartphone owners?) in Germany still makes Corona Warn-App a chart breaker I guess.

Lammy5• 6 years ago

Good. Why are people suddenly okay with building likely-permanent surveillance systems for temporary outbreaks? How would Apple ever reasonably remove this feature?

jmull4• 6 years ago

Well, the Apple/Google mechanism is not useful for surveillance.

Lammy5• 6 years ago

It’s optional and opt-in now. Do you trust it to stay that way once the framework is in 99% of people’s pocket? I sure don’t.

soziawa• 6 years ago

It is. It just requires additional beacons and at least one point where a real identity can be matched.

gruez2• 6 years ago

It is, though. If you're not infected you retain your privacy, but once you're infected and give up your contact tracing key, everyone can know whether you have been near them or not. Combine this fact with a network of Bluetooth beacons at fixed locations and a malicious actor can basically track where anywhere an infected person has went.

dharmab2• 6 years ago

It is if you build Bluetooth scanners everywhere in a city and correlate the scan data with other surveillance data, as simple as pointing a camera at whoever passes by a scanner.

VLM• 6 years ago

"I'm sure it'll only be used in opposition to my political opponents" - Says, unfortunately, everyone on all sides.

tehabe• 6 years ago

If the German app would have been less privacy aware, it wouldn't even had 16 million downloads in Germany. The decentralised approach was and is the only one which at least worked a little bit.

CivBase2• 6 years ago

"Contact tracing" was the new "blockchain" for a while. It is a technology with great potential, but I don't expect a truely effective, well-designed solution to be deployed at a large enough scale to be useful for years to come. I think it will eventually mature enough to be useful for future outbreaks - even for more benign disease. For now, though, I want to see the technology spend a little more time in the oven.

azinman213• 6 years ago

Do you actually have specific criticisms or is this just a vague feeling? To say it’s not well thought out is a baseless accusation.

CivBase2• 6 years ago

I don't think it's poorly thought out. I just think the tech is immature and the current incarnations will have to quickly improve or be superceded by something significantly better in the next few years.

m3kw92• 6 years ago

Korea did this successfully but you have to give up a lot more privacy. This protect my privacy, and expecting it to work great is some fallacy.

bad_user6• 6 years ago

Maybe, but privacy is worth protecting, more than ever.

andybak2• 6 years ago

Over lives?

Tagbert2• 6 years ago

That’s why the Apple/Google process was setup to not track your location.

sanxiyn5• 6 years ago

Very wrong. Smartphone contact tracing is successful. (e.g. in South Korea.) It's only decentralised smartphone contact tracing that failed.

njarboe• 6 years ago

"Only draconian access to personal data, as used in South Korea, seems to have brought any positive results."

The article quickly glosses over this fact (and leaves out Taiwan) and labels this successful system for stopping COVID-19 spread as draconian. I imagine that the NSA/CIA/FBI already has such a system in place that maybe it would just needs to get scaled up to cover everyone in the US. It's too bad the people in the US can't trust their government to ramp up and use such a tool to stop COVID-19 and then shut down the system afterwords. The Patriot Act proved that once given special powers any limited time provisions just keep getting extended forever. Some people born after 9/11 are adults at this point.

salimmadjd• 6 years ago

the reliability of distance estimates using Bluetooth signal attenuation

Take a look NOVID [0] the app CMU professor and graduate students built.

It uses ultrasound to be accurate within 1m.

It also approaches the utility of contact tracing in a completely different way.

[0] https://www.novid.org/

neuronic2• 6 years ago

Must be just lovely for pets at home or is it outside of the frequencies that cats can hear (up to 79 kHz)?

Also this thread is filled with people complaining about bluetooth spying capabilities and now you post an app with bluetooth always on AND microphone always listening?

poshenloh2• 6 years ago

Thanks for asking. I'm the founder of NOVID. Our app has a pet mode if your pet does not like it. This doesn't seem to have been a problem. The microphone is also not always listening. It turns on for 2 seconds when needed. The complete app source code has been given to a university security research team for review, and they will see that the microphone is used only for its intended purpose: to process ultrasonic frequencies.

poshenloh2• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. I'm the founder of NOVID. The problem has been that no other app provided direct value to the user. Other apps are designed to protect other people from you if you get exposed (they then tell you to isolate to protect others). NOVID directly protects you from others, by anonymously warning you of COVID's approach along your relationship network.

This reversal of incentives is critical.

On top of that, NOVID also actually demonstrates the necessary accuracy to function. It is the only app which dares to report estimated distances to every user on their screen.

We are trying as hard as we can to let people know about these two major points of differentiation from the rest of the contact tracing app space. Thank you for helping!

unholythree• 6 years ago

There has to be a clever way of doing this that isn’t super invasive. Having businesses record their customers and retain the only copy seems like a good compromise except something like personal phone numbers would be abused.

Maybe best would be something identifiable only to the authorities but recorded and held only by businesses. Something like driver’s license date of issuance and first name. In theory that would be meaningless to my local coffee shop or grocer; but if I tested positive contact tracers could go there and get that info (maybe just the day of my visit, or afternoon, etc.) and then correlate and contact others who visited during that time.

sanxiyn5• 6 years ago

South Korea already solved this problem: https://www.zdnet.com/article/south-korea-to-use-qr-codes-to...

There is QR code provider and QR code scanner. QR code provider includes Naver (Google in South Korea) and Kakao (WhatsApp in South Korea). QR code scanner is mandatory at venues. QR code is a random UUID. Venues keep UUID (but do not know real world identity), providers keep UUID-to-identity mapping (but do not know real world activity), KCDC gets feed from both venues and providers, join them, and do the contact tracing. In particular, it is legally mandated that only KCDC can do the join.

neuronic2• 6 years ago

Asia has solved a lot of the issues surrounding the pandemic months ago. While American and European economies will be crushed by Corona (it's I bet it's not even half time) due to conspiracy theories, ignorance and egoists and adult babies crying about wearing a mask, Asia is getting back to ramp up their economies.

They are far more capable of shutting new clusters down AND CONTROL IT. When we send people into quarantine in the West, we plea for them to stay home and everything is trust based because we want to keep our free society. Effectively, only very large local outbreak cases enjoy oversight by authorities.

Taiwan's pandemic game was on point before WHO finally let the rest of the world know about what has been suppressed in China for weeks if not months. Due to China's pressure they aren't part of WHO or UN and had no "official" global way to tell the rest of the world. They did, but were dismissed due to the massive hubris in the West and the geopolitical game China is playing.

SARS 1 is still on everyone's mind in Asia while many Americans outright deny Corona's existence even in July 2020. It's nuts.

strogonoff3• 6 years ago

Privacy issues aside (it’ll only take so long for any pile of PII to leak), this looks like an effective and quick to implement make-shift solution (smartphones are widespread enough and venue employees can enforce the scan), though I’m not sure of how much benefit these QR codes are in Korea.

In Seoul—among highest in the country in terms of new infection cases—coffeeshops, study cafes and restaurants are routinely really crowded. I have been working or eating out in one of such places here every day past two months, and I have never have been asked to scan a QR code or noticed one. I’ve only learned about it thanks to your comment.

(That said, I haven’t gone to karaoke, clubs or jjimjilbangs, and I can’t speak Korean well.)

I think restaurants and cafes are a highly underestimated vector of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Korea especially, since many of the customers aren’t wearing masks (because they’re eating) and often speak quite loudly (perhaps to drown out the inescapable loud music or from being drunk on a semi-mandatory after-work party). Usually bothersome just to me, now it’s objectively problematic—as some doctor pointed out in an interview about a choir group infection, literally the louder you are the more of your potentially-infected saliva is flying around.

raverbashing3• 6 years ago

You don't want to install a tracing app for "privacy reasons" fine.

Just make sure you don't have any of: Google's location history turned on, any FB app (FB/Instagram/Whatsapp), TikTok, 4sq/swarm, Tinder, Happn, or any app that has fine-grained location permissions.

danilocesar• 6 years ago

This!

"I care so much about my privacy!!!1!!1

- Sent from my android phone. "

go figure...

Avamander2• 6 years ago

Ah yes, the waterproof "some bad things are happening, it must mean that this other bad thing happening is also fine"-argument.

"Most people infect their devices with malware from the internet, let's all preinstall malware to every device because it has the same end result."

raverbashing3• 6 years ago

Ah yes, the waterproof "some bad things are happening, it must mean that this other bad thing happening is also fine"-argument.

Ah yes the good strawman fallacy argument

Funny how the contact tracing app requires no special permissions. None. Every extra data is completely optional.

Sure it is your choice to not install the C.T. app and install other data-hoarding apps but know what you're doing.

starbugs• 6 years ago

Did I miss something or are low adoption rates and bluetooth issues the only indicators that decentralized tracking has failed, as pointed out in the article?

The lack of statistics about success/failure otherwise seems to imply more of a "we don't know for sure"?

DangitBobby• 6 years ago

Specifically, it seems that adoption rates are so low as to render the application nearly useless.

makomk2• 6 years ago

Yeah, the overall conclusion is that smartphone contact tracing probably isn't working, but we can't know for sure because the megacorps who designed it did so in such a way that makes it almost impossible to measure if it's actually working. The only app we know has definitely been ineffective is Australia's centralized solution, in large part because they do actually have the ability to collect statistics on its effectiveness.

We do also know that Germany's app was just outright failing to send alerts to users of many common, popular devices due to limitations on background tasks: https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-coronavirus-tracing-app-criti... Obviously there's no way to know exactly how many people should've been sent a warning and weren't either, by design.

anonytrary• 6 years ago

It's just like mask usage -- nearly useless unless a critical number of people are wearing them.

aboringusername• 6 years ago

This is looking at it from a technological angle. However, what about the social/financial aspects?

If I am told to self isolate for any duration of time, will the government provide 100% of my lost wages? Will they support businesses who could be put in real trouble from someone having time off? What about potential repeated cases of isolation?

Most people (including myself) will do anything to avoid being on their radar, and will not cooperate under any circumstance due to the reality that losing money is simply not an option for me, or my employers (where I could be replaced within a day, and that's my job gone).

Sadly, most governments haven't got well thought out policies, thus reducing the potential pool of users who'd engage with contact tracing (whether done via smartphone or manual like the UK).

We desperately need a UBI, for everyone, every month, forever, regardless of status (though, if you earn over a certain amount I'd agree with limiting the UBI, like for million/billionaires).

Otherwise, as we saw recently, someone infected over 70 people because she didn't isolate, because she needs food and a roof, it was a case of infect people (and risk them dying) or...dying because she can't afford rent/basics?

Yeah...This pandemic has exposed that capitalism is fucked, and during the worst virus outbreak this century there's no support for those that need it.

Even if I wanted to isolate, I couldn't afford to. Therefore I cannot comply with any contact tracing efforts.

azinman213• 6 years ago

All of this is true if you test positive with or without an app. The app helps you know you might be asymptomatic and spreading it to people that you know or don’t know, who can then die from it or otherwise be seriously injured.

richk449• 6 years ago

Classic collective action problem. For a while, China was paying people who tested positive as a solution.

euix• 6 years ago

If you have google maps installed on your phone and location turned on, every time you visit a restaurant you already get the message of "how did you like xyz, please rate and help other visitors"

You are already living in a surveillance state. The difference is unlike in other places in the world you can complain and shout about it.

sanxiyn5• 6 years ago

Another difference is that you aren't using this data (which are collected anyway) to contain the epidemic. I can't figure out why.

nomel• 6 years ago

My hopeful guess is that their APIs and policies make the data impossible to access in anything but an aggregated format.

petre2• 6 years ago

They don't have the X is infected part and the data is also aggregated.

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

At least for now, I also have the choice to not have Google Maps on my phone and keep location disabled, which I do. So there's definitely room for things to get worse.

bluedispatcher• 6 years ago

Just because you chose to sacrifice your privacy for convenience doesn't mean it should become a baseline for what we expect. Especially nor for government services.

StanislavPetrov• 6 years ago

Reason 5,431 why I carry a 3g flip phone (with the battery often removed).

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

You should start looking into LTE flip phones. There aren't many (the Alcatel Go Flip comes to mind), but carriers are starting to phase out 3g. E.g. AT&T is killing 3g in 2022.

jt2190• 6 years ago

Ignoring the headline, it seems like the article equates quick, widespread adoption of these apps as “success”, and anything else as “failure”. Although it does note:

Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well.

Despite this, it doesn’t even bother to identify the many reasons tracing apps might not be widely adopted yet, in particular privacy concerns (although it does mention that “draconian” approaches are the only ones proven to work so far, as if that proves that privacy respecting approaches can’t be useful at all.)

Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist? Personally I’ve only heard some rumblings about the Google/Apple api, and not much more, and I’m guessing I’m far more aware of the existence of these apps than many people.

Ultimately, it’s far too early to declare “failure” on this front.

Edit: According to 9to5 Mac, there are still no apps in the U.S. using the Apple/Google API as of June 18. https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/19/how-to-turn-on-off-covid-19-c...

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

The vision of smartphone tracing apps in April was that they were going to be a cheap and low-manpower silver bullet for contact tracing. If all they represent is a slow, limited, and mildly effective supplement to normal contact tracing, I don't think they're worth the privacy concerns in the first place.

azinman213• 6 years ago

The privacy concerns were addressed in the design of the frameworks.

hrktb• 6 years ago

During the lockdown people were paying close attention to news and gov. got all the attention it wanted.

In particular for France, regulations were passed to allow or deny activities, set curfew etc. with hefty fines associated, all of that at a few days notice at most. So, not closely following the news was not an option, and the tracing app got plenty of air time.

Now, it came after a month or two of bullshit from the health dept (“you don’t need masks, also go vote in person, it’s fine”), which itself came after half a year of protests against the gov, so most people weren’t sold on gov’s good intents on not abusing the app, especially as Apple/Google’s privacy focused solution was not adopted.

Robotbeat• 6 years ago

Agreed. And I hate headlines like this that mislead their audience. Headlines must be stand-alone true as >90% of the people who happen to see the headline aren’t going to read the article. A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in.

(Which of course becomes self-reinforcing... If the vast majority of people who see the headline are led to think the apps don’t work, then they won’t want to adopt them... and low adoption is, of course, the very “failure” discussed in the first place...)

This may seem like a small thing, but the apparent license-to-lie-or-at-least-use-half-truths-in-headlines that many media editors (because editors, NOT journalists, control the headlines) believe they have is maybe the biggest problem in media accuracy we have. We are bombarded with 10-100 times as many headlines as we can possibly hope to read, which is a constant background noise of half-truths.

And yeah, of course a headline won’t be able to tell the full story. But it should be accurate enough and not misleading. The excuse of “but you have to read the full article or you’re just lazy” is a ridiculous cop-out for a license to lie.

JamisonM• 6 years ago

" A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in."

That would be an entirely accurate impression, contact tracing apps have a proven track record of not working so far. That one contributing factor is the lack of buy-in in the population does not detract from that point.

bbrazil2• 6 years ago

Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist?

Speaking for Ireland the app was heavily publicised, and there's even a prominent "Share app" feature in the app itself.

quicklime• 6 years ago

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in the article or any comments, and I'm wondering whether I'm missing something about the significance of this.

But I thought the biggest problem was that Google and Apple didn't build a contract tracing app - they built a framework for local governments to build apps on top of. This leaves the work of marketing the app and driving adoption to each government (as well as building and operating the service, which is also significant).

When I first heard about this, I thought they were going to build a pair of apps for Android and iOS. It would come as part of an OTA update, and everyone around the world would be presented with a yes/no dialog asking whether they wanted to participate. Local governments would then be provided access to a SaaS that would let their contact tracers enter the tokens of known positive cases.

I'm fairly sure that this would've resulted in significantly higher adoption rates.

I have no idea what the point was, to require every government build/market/operate their own version of the exact same app. Maybe so that the backends could be independent? If so, I imagine there would be other ways to work around that, like offering a cloud service and/or an open source backend implementation for governments to self-host.

ponker• 6 years ago

They didn’t want the PR risk of owning the app

thewebcount• 6 years ago

Exactly this! My spouse asked me the other day if Apple had released their contact tracing app yet. It was difficult to explain in lay terms that Apple was not releasing an app, just the tools to make an app.

thetanil2• 6 years ago

Ask me if I will volunteer to give apple or google any more information than they already collect and my answer will always be no. I don't care what the reasoning. Germany did it right.

nxpnsv2• 6 years ago

So they’d have to just force it then?

azinman213• 6 years ago

Germany adopted the Apple/Google framework, which is exactly what an Apple/Google app would use. The whole point of the design is that it’s decentralized and you wouldn’t be giving Apple/Google more information.

zepto4• 6 years ago

Since the contract tracing api doesn’t give information to Apple or Google, it’s hard to see what relevance this comment has.

ridewinter2• 6 years ago

The whole reason for Apple-Google getting involved in the first place was a technical issue that prevents Android from seeing iOS. Instead of solving that issue to allow a variety of solutions to be developed, they forced the entire world to create the apps in a certain way.

It's not that their privacy-centric approach was wrong (although this article details its major shortcomings), but the suppression of trial & error definitely was wrong.

Compounding this was Google-Apple's insistence that only government bodies can release exposure notification apps and you have a total absence of real innovation. It's no surprise that nothing has succeeded.

The whole debacle is a case study in the effect of gatekeepers on innovation. As manual contract tracing teams here in the US become overwhelmed, how many lives could have been saved by a successful exposure notification app?

zepto4• 6 years ago

If there were no gatekeepers on this, how much contact tracing fraud and malware would there be?

cl3misch• 6 years ago

I think the individual apps on top of the same framework are not identical in the way the data is collected and stored. AFAIK in some countries they have a centralized database, whereas e.g. in Germany all contact IDs are kept locally and only compared to a published (but anonymized) list of infected IDs.

johannes12343212• 6 years ago

No, that's not the difference. The contacts are stored inside the system's framework.

The difference is in how people report themselves as infected. That has to match the country's process for verification of the result.

usrusr3• 6 years ago

There are two parts where local authorities need to be involved: troll-proofing the way people flag themselves as infected and translating exposure into actionable instructions/suggestions (e.g. different testing capacities require different testing strategies).

I agree that Google/Apple could have done a lot more, like an OS-branded App with extensive functional localization in cooperation with local authorities. But looking back at how pretty much every country was initially trying very hard to avoid working with the OS makers Google/Apple might not be to blame at all for merely providing a minimal API instead of a complete turnkey solution. Governments all over the world were only coerced into adopting the API by malware countermeasures already present in the operating systems, almost like a sudden vindication of Lessig's old "code is law" claim.

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

Idk, maybe Google and Apple could do more, but I thought it was almost a wonder how fast Google and Apple came up with a workable framework.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

Probably because they were already using it internally for other purposes.

Tagbert2• 6 years ago

Because it is not location tracking. It is simpler. It just records nearby pings of other phones.

xorcist2• 6 years ago

Apple and Google are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with this contact tracing.

Between them, they have exact positions of a vast majority of individuals, at least in western societies. They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have.

This would however set a bad precedent on how this data is shared. Law enforcement is one thing, medial tracing is another. So instead they set out to build this BLE tracing toolkit, which is something that at best is intended for future use, when everyone has the requisite hardware and software installed. It wouldn't reach more than a minority of users today which severely limits its usefulness, all for the possibility of reaching into situations such as bus rides, where nobody really knows how contagious these situations are because we simply do not have enough knowledge of the virus yet. Real world measurements are also likely to be noisy (where someone carries their phone in their hand and another in their backpack with a water bottle) even if we could set a hard limit on a safe distance, which we can't.

So maybe we will get something useful in the future, for the price of not exposing the data already available today.

It is amusing that the BLE tracing toolkits were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to Google and Apple, the exact entities who already have fine grained location data on most people.

Despegar• 6 years ago

They could have done useful contact tracing at the press of a button, even historically, for every major event such as large concerts, churches, night clubs which we know were the most important situations to contact trace. They could have done this with the data they already have.

Apple definitely could not have done this because they don't have this data.

chipotle_coyote• 6 years ago

It is amusing that the BLE tracing toolkits were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to Google and Apple, the exact entities who already have fine grained location data on most people.

I think they were sold as a way of not having to expose your location data to government authorities. Also, Apple makes a fair amount of noise about not collecting fine-grained location data and other PII on their servers; as far as I know, at least, they simply don't do the kind of server-side logging that would let them do the kind of historical reconstruction you're describing in your first paragraph. I'm not entirely sure Google does, either, for that matter, even though they keep a lot more server-side.

(Foursquare, of all companies, could probably do it. But only for a too-small subset of people.)

jariel2• 6 years ago

From personal experience in this industry, the issues are mostly pragmatic, i.e. legal, and then about authoritarian regimes. There are some ideological issues concerning 'personal information' that varies from company to company and we linger a lot about that in the Western press and on HN, but that's really not it.

It's very simple: if your ABC company has the ability to 'trace' people, and you allow 'friendly country' XYZ to use it - then 100% of 'baddie countries' will immediately full court press for access as well, with the possibility of banning your tech if you don't.

And then the political/power haggling ensues: dictators actually do have to worry about popularity, so what would it mean to invalidate all the iPhones in Saudia Arabia ... probably not good, so there's that. On the other hand, being able to 'trace everyone', especially my political enemies is also exetentiayly powerful so ...

I don't know what would happen if this were not the case - if this were 40 years ago, we were not as technically globalised and Apple was just selling to US/Canada, we may see different outcomes.

But as it stands, most governments in the world are 'completely untrustable' with the tech, and so it's almost like it renders moot the question of whether Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, or the US can have it and 'play well'.

mantap• 6 years ago

I believe this isn't correct. Contact tracing can't work using location data, because it's far too coarse and unreliable to be useful. Too many false positives.

The point isn't to figure out where the contacts were. It's to figure out who they were.

Dylan16807• 6 years ago

Law enforcement is one thing, medial tracing is another.

Dragnet location use is vastly more justified for pandemic tracing than for law enforcement. I'm not sure how this could set a worse precedent than we already have. Just trading one for the other would be a boon for privacy.

grazhero99• 6 years ago

Maybe so that the backends could be independent?

Funny, I misread 'backends' as 'backdoors'.

nxpnsv2• 6 years ago

I find it odd how many people get paranoid with tracing but still use Facebook or google products...

cgearhart• 6 years ago

One of the potential advantages of a centralised model is that it would allow the use of machine learning to adapt thresholds to minimise error...

This is a cop out. Machine learning isn’t magic. If the proximity measurement doesn’t really work without ML then it’s probably not going to start working with ML. Besides, if you really wanted to do it in a decentralized app you could use federated learning, no?

Closi• 6 years ago

ML could be an overstretch, but centralised approaches definitely do allow for more analysis and a deeper rules-based approach.

stevedotcarter3• 6 years ago

I live in Ireland and our contact tracing app (using Google+Apple tech) seems to be doing well. There was about 1 million install 1-2 days after it launched, currently standing at 1.4 million installs (population is 4.9 million), along with some positive contacts reported:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53525712

It was also donated to open source.

https://www.nearform.com/blog/ireland-donates-contact-tracin...

While that is useful I think each country will face its own challenges with adoption.

bbrazil2• 6 years ago

Indeed, and it's early days yet.

From the article:

It also reveals that, whatever the people of Ireland have been told, their app is collecting centralised data on them.

The signup flow has a very obvious and well written opt-in for collection of anonymised data to help track how well the app is working, which was mentioned by the BBC article linked. I don't think people are being mislead.

I personally decided not to enable that, but did give the app my phone number to be shared in the event I'm a close contact.

it has been in use, it is claimed to have resulted in 91 “close contact exposure alerts”, which is remarkably few.

That they know of, as those users either opted in to the anonymous tracking or (possibly) gave their phone number. It'd be useful to know how the install base per the usual Android/iOS stats compare with the anonymous tracking enablement, but those numbers haven't been shared as far as I'm aware.

Right now our overall case numbers are low enough (around 20 per day) that it's likely hard to tell how effective the app is. However our R is currently estimated at 1.1, so even a little help from the app could help keep us below 1.

markdown• 6 years ago

Does your Irish app require the app to be open on iOS?

stevedotcarter3• 6 years ago

Not that I’m aware of. The app just reads the data your phone is already collecting.

It’s making use of the api that Apple and Google added to iOS and Android. Which I believe once enabled is using Bluetooth beacons to keep a list of other phones you have been nearby. That’s all done by phone, not the app.

If you test positive, then you are expected to use the app to upload the list of phones you were in contact with. Notifications will then be sent to all those phones through the app.

toyg3• 6 years ago

No, reportedly it was the first app to use the Google/Apple framework from the very start, which doesn’t suffer from that issue.

Leherenn• 6 years ago

Does installed mean active? Here, the local app had good penetration, but daily activation was rather low and constantly decreasing.

One of the concern is that it impacts battery life, so people turn it off most of the time unless they plan to go to a public space. Then they forget to turn it on.

stevedotcarter3• 6 years ago

You’re right, it doesn’t mean active.

It’s possible many of those users did not grant the contact tracing permission on the phone when installing. But I’m assuming anyone who went to both of installing would be open to allowing it. They could also have uninstalled 10 mins later. I don’t know how the number is being calculated.

I’m on iOS and keep app installs on my phone to a minimal but haven’t noticed battery drain so far. Android my differ.

Also your phone can collect the data by enabling in Settings > Privacy > Health > COVID-19 without the app at all.

johannes12343212• 6 years ago

Example of the success of the German app: https://www.lra-bgl.de/t/das-landratsamt/aktuelles/details/n... (sorry German)

In the region of Berchtesgaden a asymptomatic person for a warning from their app and was confirmed positive. Due to the app that person didn't spread further.

Now we can argue how many of such cases we need for calling it a true success and then we can discuss if a single case makes the news if that's a bad sign ... on the later it's important to mind that certainly not every case makes that news and it's from a region with low virus load to begin with.

usrusr3• 6 years ago

I disagree with the failure claims except for lack of adoption.

How can unreliable distance measurements be an issue? Actual viral spread over distance is a much, much bigger uncertainty. Even improving distance measurements to the nanometer wouldn't make much of a difference considering transmission prediction. Sometimes the virus bridges tens of meters, other times it fails to make landfall in a prolonged skin on skin situation.

Measuring impact is a simple polling research problem: if you want to know this kind of thing (and I think you should) you need to accompany your PCR tests with a tiny little questionnaire collecting data about why the test was done. Failure to collect that data is entirely unrelated to the app.

denysvitali• 6 years ago

The thing that still blows my mind about the whole contact tracing solutions in Europe is that the servers do not federate with themselves, and that you can only keep a single country specific app active at the time.

This leads to the situation where people that usually cross the country's borders will only use a single app which may not track all of the contacts. So far, the current solution is IMHO useless - but I keep on using it.

In my case I just keep one app active at all time (the one from my home country), but it would be more effective if with a single app I was able to track the contacts with people from other countries too.

Stupid simple example: I live in Switzerland (SwissCovid), and ideally when I cross the italian border I'll need to activate the italian contact tracing app (Immuni), but contacts with people that use a different app won't be counted even if they are infected - which totally misses the point of having a contact tracing in the first place :(

wtmt• 6 years ago

I was suspicious of the effectiveness of contact tracing apps, which have to rely on something as unreliable as Bluetooth to estimate distance across different kinds of hardware, different kinds of software drivers and in different situations. That got worse with some governments wanting to collect location information through the contact tracing apps 24/7 and centralize it.

It would appear that no government has thought this out properly yet.

This seems to be true at least in India, where the app is a centralized one that doesn’t use the Apple/Google framework The app tracks the location of users at all times (it asks for that permission) and hence cannot use the APIs since Apple and Google prohibit such apps from collecting location information. Since it requires background location access and Internet connectivity, it’s a good addition to drain batteries quicker.

The government also famously declared that the app would be open sourced so that it could be improved and issues fixed. That turned out to be a farce with the source released only for the Android version, and that too for an older version of the app with some code removed (the code on the Play Store was newer). They stopped releasing updates of the source. They didn’t release the source of the iOS app, which was supposed to be “shortly” (that was around two months ago). They didn’t fix the issues that people raised on GitHub. Yet the government claimed that the app was effective and put out some numbers on it being useful (without any backing data or any way to verify those claims).

It gets even worse. The app being a platform for contact tracing is only one facet. The goal that wasn’t widely disclosed was to have private companies build on top of the app and its server side data to create platforms on health data collected from hundreds of millions of people. Note that India doesn’t have a data privacy or data protection law, leave alone anything to control health related data in the hands of crony capitalists and opportunists.

Now all talk about contact tracing and its effectiveness is muted or nowhere to be seen, though the app is being pushed as a requirement to give people permission to travel and for other purposes.

The platform has become, and is continuing to become, what some people feared...and that’s getting farther from handling COVID-19 or a public health crisis.

ArkVark• 6 years ago

Contact Tracing is not recommended (and basically pointless) for mild respiratory illnesses like Coronaviruses because for the vast majority of people, they are asymptomatic or lowly symptomatic, and the spread can be extensive.

Its only recommended for more serious viruses like Ebola.

avivo• 6 years ago

This is completely missing what is likely the primary obstacle to adoption, at least in the US. Apple and Google require an entire state to commit exclusively to using a single app. Even though they use a protocol that would easily interoperate across jurisdictions and apps effectively.

City governments which could move much faster are unable to do anything. States are on fire dealing with others things. They also all want some smaller scale trial to happen first, but no one can do that according to Apple/Google policies. So they are all stuck in a chicken and egg problem...

(This is all according my sources working directly on such apps which were ready to deploy 3 months ago — but were completely stopped by the policy; I'm interested to hear if anyone is aware of reasons why this might not be accurate).

whyever• 6 years ago

I think this is intentional to prevent confusion/abuse. The national app also gets singled out on the Play Store.

eecc• 6 years ago

Italy’s Immuni wasn’t downloaded enough to be a significant sample; people are too worried about their bloody battery performance and “what if I’m flagged and gub’mint makes me isolate home”. The National Health Service’s effort to run a population wide serological sample was also declined because “what if I’m positive and I need to stay home”. The fucking chemical reagents expired in the meantime.

It’s these times when I have to make an effort not to praise regimes for their efficiency in enforcement... or it’s just theater and marketing and human nature is rotting their process to the core as well..

kevinpet• 6 years ago

Comments like "what if I’m flagged and gub’mint makes me isolate home" makes me think of people who object that the problem is idiot users who don't recognize a clearly superior product. If people don't trust the government, that's a failure of that government.

toyg3• 6 years ago

We’ve seen the same phenomenon across countries as different as Norway and Italy. Some fears are primal.

smabie• 6 years ago

Just pay each person a $100 if they download the app, or whatever. People react to incentives, and downloading the app brings no personal benefit. Change that.

rossdavidh• 6 years ago

Really, I bet $10 would be enough to get a high adoption rate.

cwhiz• 6 years ago

Contact tracing apps were NEVER going to work. There are numerous fundamental technical problems but those aren’t even worth getting into, because people won’t use this shit.

Smartphone contact tracing is an absurd silver bullet pipe dream from a bunch of hammers who see the world as full of nails. It won’t work, can’t work, and will not ever work.

How much more effort are people going to waste on this?? Every time this comes up on HN the horde mass downvotes anyone who dares to dissent. It’s been almost five months now.

junipertea• 6 years ago

Can you name those fundamental technical problems? From my understanding, the problems are adoption and states being slow in implementing the apps. I don’t have any exact numbers, but I would say even with some false positives it will be much more directed unlike testing everyone daily.

toyg3• 6 years ago

I agree that it won’t work in Europe or the US and it was absurdly over-hyped, but mobile-based helpers have been effective in Asia. The critical difference is that Asian countries can mandate this sort of thing, since their populations seem to be culturally more willing to accept a higher degree of illiberal state control over their lives (for the good of society at large). If the app had to be installed and configured in every smartphone sold, and you were forced to show it to police spot-checks on the streets, adoption rates wouldn’t be a problem.

This is obviously unfeasible and undesirable in most Western countries (at the moment...) so we’re left with a voluntary scheme that is only as effective as typical voluntary schemes (i.e. not much).

fomine3• 6 years ago

Grouping as "Asisan countries" is wrong.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

Not possible until UWB is ubiquitous.

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

There's no mention of China in this article. China had a pretty large-scale tracing system using smartphones. Has that also failed?

diebeforei485• 6 years ago

It's because the privacy-at-any-cost camp, like the EFF, raised hell and prevented Apple from making an app themselves. So only cash-starved state governments can make apps, which is unlikely to happen.

They have blood on their hands.

xfitm3• 6 years ago

I'm pleased to see this. I'm privacy forward and there is no doubt this information will be abused by private and public entities. We simply need to deal with this another way without giving up yet another bit of privacy.

Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

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