Well, if you follow German public TV news (ARD), then this is the latest over the weekend about this newly developed Corona App that will be available for your smartphone.
The geeks will say that it was all ready in April....but some privacy issues were laid out and the government approval wasn't forthcoming.
The Health Minister (Spahn, CDU) announced that the App will be released in the next week. Zero cost....at this point.
Two issues basically stalled this from release. First was the privacy of data business, and this has been solved apparently. The second was this problem of power-consumption. Whatever was in the program originally....was a battery-drainer, and this has been resolved in some degree. Most folks admit....if this were to take up a quarter of battery power and trigger constant recharging.....it'd be doomed upon release.
The way this works? You load the App, and come down with the Covid-19 virus. They note your smartphone and proceed to note all the people you 'bumped' into over the past couple of days, and a mass notification takes place.
So you start to think about this. Me? I'm a retiree and I might be all over Wiesbaden and be within 250 people on an average day (at least before the virus period started). I'd be at the ice cream shop....coffee shop.....riding the bus around town.....walking through stores....and just hanging out. So this mass email would go to 250 folks, and the odds are that 20-percent would freak out.
Just ten old guys like me, with Corona....could unsettle 2,500 residents from the town. A hundred old guys like me with Corona? 25,000 residents might be worried.
How many will download the App? Unknown. Right now....it's voluntary. My guess is that in the first month....maybe five-to-ten percent of the population will put it on the phone. Maybe by November....we might reach the forty-percent level.
The conspiracy crowd going against it? Yes, without any doubt. The geeky pro-privacy crowd? They probably won't support the App either.
Me? I'd just be worried that my German wife would hack into this and start tracking my movements throughout the day and figure out my ice cream stops and frequent stops at cafes to sip apple wine in the summer time.
2 comments:
Ironically I work for a tech company that provides and develops equipment for researchers. We've pretty much got the covid tracing app inbuilt as a feature within our app, but we don't trust the state to use it responsibly. As of now we encrypt everything so that the participants only track other study participants.
I don't think more than 10-percent of German society would trust the government (of any party) to use the data in a responsible fashion. Only time will tell if people load it and accept it.
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