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Failure to launch US phone Covid-tracking apps?

4 points by nick_kline ↗ HN
What's going on with phone based covid-tracking apps? Apple & Google have widely released bluetooth based tracking capabilities that need an app to leverage them, and in the US these seem to be state based. The US has a disgraceful national failure to have a countrywide plan for most cv19 issues. The Google & Apple strategy we have seems to be that each state makes their own app leveraging the infrastructure. My state (Washington) doesn't have an app as of now.

Only a few states have released them. Washington State people have been working on an app for a while; commoncircle.us seems to be their website, they have a github site that hasn't had a checkin for a couple of months. Is this effort dead? Their twitter account has nothing since July. Why isn't there an app available or any discussion?

Overview article of the US situation: https://gazette.com/health/people-proving-the-weakest-link-for-covid-tracking-apps/article_42a267c4-2aaf-11eb-85d8-cf1d8cde5661.html

Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2020/11/20/people-are-proving-to-be-the-weakest-link-for-apps-tracking-covid-exposure_partner/

UW engineering presentation about the effort by prof. Stefano Tessaro (Oct 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geAIEwBOSRY&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=UWVideo

3 comments

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verdverm
I am not going to install a government app for tracking. That is a slippery slope. These government officials have thoroughly demonstrated their incompetence and unwillingness to admit their failures. When they have taken more power, when have they relinquished it?

Also consider that the US is a Republic and lets states keep larger amounts of their rights to run their own state the way they want. There federal government cannot legally prescribe solutions, only encourage and inform.

Another reason to avoid bluetooth all together is the immense amount of tracking going on in the physical world via Beacons. I explicitly disable bluetooth when not using it. I would not be surprised if Apple & Google or the Govt use this information / tech for other reasons.

giantg2
"Also consider that the US is a Republic and lets states keep larger amounts of their rights to run their own state the way they want. There federal government cannot legally prescribe solutions, only encourage and inform."

This is how it should work. But the tenth ammendment has largely been ignored.

rdtwo
There are a lot of problems with covid app. First privacy, second adoption and finally what do you even do if you have been exposed there are no national policies to protect your job or life. Most of the people exposed have to work to eat so positive or not you gotta show up to earn your paycheck. What’s the value of knowing if the knowledge is mostly an inconvenience. The places the app is used it’s mostly state mandated if it wasn’t I’m sure adoption would be much lower