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One of the most innovative startups in Italy. Bending Spoons is based in Milan. When you open the site you find "We hack the future". If you go to the manifesto section they state "We're hackers".

They manage to create one of the most innovative covid-tracing app, supported by the government immuni was immediately available. But still, when you scale too fast something can happen. Public sanitary service wasn't able to update the app, and as a result very few where the reports and notifications.

What's your opinion on that?

Some english details here: http://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/dettaglioN...

Is there a track and tracing app in the West that has not been a failure by any reasonable metric?

IMHO, these apps required clear sanitary objectives, centralised data handling, and governments' leadership. Instead, everywhere it seems that people got sucked into debates on privacy, "innovative solutions", and governments' involvement, with private companies without any prior experience of the domain (public health and infectious disease management) developing their own apps in a completely haphazard way and with a great lack of political courage from governments.

I had predicted many months ago these apps would end up nowhere for the reasons above and, unfortunately that's exactly what happened.

We could have looked at how China did it for example. But then one of the issues politically is that anyone suggesting that would be pilloried for wanting to "turn the country into a tyranny"...

Regarding your point about technical issues, they may be an "innovative startup" but what is their experience about large scale systems? This did not require to be innovative, it required a large scale, robust, and centralised system in order to deliver the most results in terms of public health.

I feel this was the moment idealism crashed into reality.

I completely agree with you! Thank you for the comment.

But isn't it a tiranny anyway the way government acted? Where leaving your house has become the biggest sin you can commit and where police is one step away from entering our houses?

Btw I want to know more... You talked about "West failure", with which conditions the covid-tracing app was able to work? For which sacrifice?

And there were any benefits out of that?