For those "40% only if privacy concerns are addressed" there is a gradient of privacy. How many of them will still have concerns no matter what? And how many will not install anything out of laziness/comfort?
Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are installed in 90%+ of phones and happily scoop up location data every day.
And anyway, our rights are anyway being temporarily but heavily reduced. I don't see why we have to also install this app, especially since having everyone wear a mask and washing one's hands would make the whole point of having contact with an infected person almost irrelevant.
Mandatory apps installation.. I guess that could be rolled out as most providers can and do have the ability to install stuff on your phone remotely.
That said.. what are the odds average person gets sufficiently annoyed by gvmt mandated apps and installs lineage?
Won't happen to any meaningful degree. IMO if technologists fail to sensitize public discourse against the emerging dangers of surveillance tech now contemporary western democracies are probably about to be "disrupted".
Naturally, I could be wrong ( and has been about cellphones for a while now ). And then, my mom could barely handle switch from Whatsapp to Signal.
edit: coffee didn't kick in yet. added barely before handle
Making owning and carrying a smartphone with required app mandatory won't fly in any healthy democracy.
One compromise in making it semi-mandatory could be to reduce lockdown requirements for people using and carrying the app, because they'd be less dangerous.
The answer to these questions is easy in a authotarian state: you assume they are bad actors and use the full force of the state on them – so people will go out of their way to do as if they comply with your rules even if they don't.
In any democratic nation with a culture of scepticism when it comes to the government it won't be that easy. If you force people to do things over here, you will get a considerable portion of people working actively against you in ways that you cannot prove. It might be easier, more efficient and fruitful to just make it voluntary.
* people who own an Android or IOS smartphone to install a required app? (Might work if Google or Apple pushes the software, but does this outlaw non-stock-Android and IOS operating systems on a smartphone? Will Apple/Google do this for every country with an app?)
* people who don't own a smartphone to buy one? (Subsidized? Black-box devices that only need to be charged at home as an alternative for this group? How do you deal with people who don't want one for valid reasons besides privacy? E.g., people who got rid of them because they are vulnerable to the addictive properties of smartphone apps? And of course people who can't afford them.)
* people who can't use a smartphone to carry one around? (The digitally or otherwise illiterate or mentally incapable, and people with physical limitations won't just disappear overnight. This includes many elderly; exactly the weakest group with this virus.)
I wonder. Some of my friends don't own a smartphone. How will that contact tracing app run on their Nokia from 2010? Or will they get a smartphone from the state? How would you check if someone owns a smartphone, or whether they are pretending to have one of the old ones? If your goal is to get as many installations as possible on devices people take with them is it really the most productive thing to try forcing it?
Don't get me wrong, I do realize that propper contact tracing is the only way to deal with this virus until we got a vaccine, but I don't see how a mandatory app installment could be enforced in any western state without breaking fundamental rights. You'd literally have police knock at doors and force people to unlock their phones in order to check the installed apps, if you really want it to be installed everywhere. You would have to stop people in the street and have them show you their device AND frisk them to make sure they are not showing you a decoy device with the line: "Ooops the battery went out" or "Ooops I broke it a few minutes ago".
No – in western democracies transparency and voluntariness carries much farther. If the CCC approved any contact tracing app, even I'd immidiately install it without hesitation. If however I had to trust a closed source app by a government which tried at every turn to legalize the surveilance state I'd probably not do it. If the state would force me to do it, I would actively work against it and help others to do the same.
But you show exactly the bigger problem: the West is so individualistic, that it will rather have millions of deaths and economic collapse than a bit of privacy infringement over a number of months, again, everybody viewing himself as some sort of secret agent that the government is out to get at all costs.
Asian countries on the other hand understand that some time you need to make some real sacrifices yourself for the greater good.
Especially in the german speaking parts of Europe the scepticism towards government data collection has historical roots that I probably don't have to elaborate on, with people who died from said collection still in living memory. While safety is a fundamental right, it doesn't outweight all the other fundamental rights automatically. These rights need to be balanced even (and especially) in times of crisis.
I think the right way here would be to follow the CCC recommendations, and make it about a voluntary utilitaristic action, rather than enforcing it from the top down. People have to want to do it, just like they did in China. How you will get them there is different in Europe however.
