It does not have to be built that way: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents

This is what we'll hopefully be using in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, the PEPP-PT approach will not protect privacy in many European countries. This is because an individual is linked to a phone number. Since you cannot purchase a SIM card in many countries without showing ID (and a copy of your ID is made and sent to the state authorities), the state is easily able to match phone numbers with people’s real identities. Consequently, the authorities will easily be able to track the user’s movements, or at least track what other people that person interacted with over a period of time, which is essentially the same thing.

If you read the PEPP-PT documentation closely, the “privacy protections” are mainly keeping you anonymous to other ordinary people. But people should reasonably want to remain anonymous from the state as well.

I agree that PEPP-PT is not too clear on their commitment to protecting privacy. I disagree that anything about the DP-3T system divulges SUM numbers. Go read the 3 pager and see.

In order to automatically send warning SMSs to everyone you have been in contact with, the system has to link app users to phone numbers.

Emergency powers to protect us after 9/11 are still in place — two decades later.

Emergency powers to fund world wars are still in place — eight decades later.

It never goes away.

The DP-3T system explicitly calls out the fact that it dismantles itself after the epidemic as a feature.

But think of the ad revenue you can drive off this data set!

I proposed an app [1] owned by WHO to do the tracking, almost nobody cared. Now governments will handle it, as they want.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/proposal-way-reduce-coronavir...

The WHO is good at some important things, but not deploying apps to billions of citizens.

This is kinda a side question. But how do we know the NSA doesn't already do this?

The linked article describes a tracking system that would be mandatory for every single American in order to e.g. board public transportation. (Such a system has already been rolled out in China where people get an automatic red–yellow–green health code and have to show it in public places.) While one can reasonably assume that the NSA is already capable of tracking a huge amount of phone location data from Google or Apple devices, people are still free to not have such a phone and they are still able to move around in public.

And if it's law that you can uninstall it when you've been vaccinated? It can be unmade.

The government will like being able to track every citizen too much for that to happen.