Anyone who has dealt with trying to work out distance from Bluetooth signal strength will know that it is virtually impossible once you factor in, the orientation of two devices (signal polarization), their locations (in a pocket, bag, case...) and the local environment (reflections and attenuation from walls, floors ceilings, furniture).
Additionally, without knowing exactly how transmission is occurring the risk score calculation https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/blob/ma... may be wildly inaccurate too resulting in the wrong people being notified.
And even assuming perfect ability to deduce the risk of infection of two people using the app, will that help in the bigger context. If the people most at risk don't install this app and the least at risk do then you may be drawing resources away from the people that most need help.
This is pretty much just an extension to classic contact tracing. And there you also have to work with very rough categories of risk, this isn't so much different.
Nevertheless, countries who have been successful in reducing the spread also need to find ways to drive R0 below 1 for a long time. This has proven difficult in Germany.
Therefore, it seems that any reasonable false positive rate will still be a net benefit - given that active cases are now very low and it is desirable to catch any infections early.
So yes, this will not help everyone. And yes, it may lead to false positive quarantines - until test results are back.
But it still seems to be a net positive as long as the privacy part is intact.
But on HN, any criticism of this tech is met with a swift unsubstantiated down-vote.
Reading about the app I remembered the book of Hans Rosling ("Factfulness") where he describes a situation in Africa during an Ebola outbreak. He wrote: There where people with apps everywhere. The apps were the hammers looking for nails. However, it just consumed resources and shadowed the fact that numbers reported were just messy and the epidemic was over 14 days ago. In the end they had to do data cleaning and they managed _Ebola_ without an app.
I think this app will make people become accustomed to getting traced for $reason.
> The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and Deutsche Telekom are contributing to this project. At the same time our commitment to open source means that we are enabling -in fact encouraging- all interested parties to contribute and become part of its developer community.
https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android#contribut...
I guess they probably have some "experimental" departments for recruitment purposes, they must have used those.
And btw: none are software dev consultancies. SAP sells enterprise software. DT is into telecommunications with some data center presence.
Here's how I understand the system:
Your phone saves the ID numbers of the phones it's come into close contact with. The IDs are randomly generated, so they don't contain any information about the person carrying the phone. When someone tests positive for the virus, they can transmit their ID to a central server, which then broadcasts that ID to everyone with the app. The app checks that ID against its local list of contacts.
I suspect combination of soft corruption and perverse incentives.
The fragmented landscape is unfortunate. It's not just the code being developed that could benefit from a cooperative approach, the ethical, legal, medical and governance issues around these apps could benefit a lot from a shared European approach.
We have done this with the GDPR, we should collaborate on this as well.
The Stopp Corona app is developed by the Austrian red cross and has already been successfully deployed and used. There's a lot of experience around it.
Why not begin with a fork and add your own requirements? Then slowly try to merge those upstream? Now the landscape is fragmented from the start. It's NIH all over the place.
The UK app's source code has been released. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107553
Android repository: https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-app-android-ch
iOS repository: https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-app-ios-ch
Covidcode Frontend: https://github.com/admin-ch/CovidCode-UI
App backend: https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-sdk-backend
App config backend: https://github.com/DP-3T/dp3t-config-backend-ch
Covidcode backend: https://github.com/admin-ch/CovidCode-Service
I installed it today and I live in one of the 4 pilot regions, let's see how it goes.
Other apps can do without central tracking Id's. It was fishy that Germany waited weeks for this Google API (officially to support low voltage Bluetooth), whilst other countries had their open source apps ready for long. Germany and France pushed for centralized tracking, it was called off after protests, now its again in via their US friends.
BLE based. Similar usage protocol.
Instead of 50 odd countries, each making tracing app with ~90% similarity, doesn’t it make sense that there is one grand GitHub repo? Each country instantiates their own variant of it, by injecting own config, while contributing to the this repo.
Am surprised at the mushrooming effect here.
The government has already had more than 3 months to get this ready.
