People (rightly, or wrongly) don't trust technology enough, after the reputation Silicon Valley has built and can't shed, around privacy.

I'm on an Android phone, and sure, Citizen and a local State app can do the contact tracing. But what's Citizen doing with that data? It also requires interactivity (another Silicon Valley favorite thing to do - call out for people to perform actions via alerts and notifications).

It's a lower bar for people to wear masks than to accept to use an app for contact tracing, if you were to compare the policy actions. Now, you can have the contact tracers call people, but how many spam calls do you get that you ignore? And phishing attempts? I received numerous texts from "the Democrats" with a person's name, urging me to vote, from all sorts of US numbers, and asking for a reply. To this day I don't know how real that is.

There are too many people to blame for this state of affairs, but the greed and competition for eyeballs are the definite drivers.