And the alternative of not using them.

I wasn't fundamentally opposed, but as discussion went the way to maybe mandate usage, I thought it more prudent to abstain.

While technically there is nothing wrong with the implementation of Google or Apple, if they behave as specfified, I will not share any medical info with my smartphone as long as we do not have open systems in place.

The problem is understood and not accepted. These cases of third party ambition are a plain confirmation about the doubts many people had. You can ignore it but some people might not want to follow.

I have access to COVID tests through doctors in my family. I believe such tests would serve us better than these wellness apps. Scaling up the production would be possible within the budget that was used for tracing apps.

You can’t easily not use a lot of the data broker stuff that random apps use to resell your data. The data is sold without you noticing.

Maybe you’re cautious, but check the location services for apps on your phone - random third party apps may be selling it to brokers that then resell it to others. Even innocuous apps like free weather apps will do this sort of thing. [0]

Thankfully Apple’s OS updates are making this harder, but that’s relatively new.

The Bluetooth implementation doesn’t require you to input any medical data.

I agree that ubiquitous, free testing would have also helped. I think very high quality exposure notifications paired with quarantine would have been very effective too.

[0]: https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/01/05/weather-apps-are-secr... (there was a better article on HN more recently, but I can’t remember the title).

It looks like you’re saying that apple’s and google’s solution can’t be used for privacy abuse.

Could it facilitate implementing one? E.g. could a country push for changes to how the solution works within a given location?

Phones track location so yeah a government could always try to force companies to hand over location data, but that issue is orthogonal to this solution.

Their Bluetooth implementation makes it harder for governments to request more problematic location data, because a solution exists that doesn’t require this kind of data.

The existence of this solution reduces privacy abuse risk.

Sad reality: Countries can always push, say, for mandatory upload of all cryptographic keys to government servers. We have to trust in megacorp lawyers to protect us from that at least to the point of exposing that come election times.

We’re trying to tell you that this would have happened anyway and contact tracing itself is just another instrument in the surveillance state.

And I’m trying to tell you that this overly simplistic response ignores pragmatic real-world solutions that let people accomplish hard things even with multiple constraints.

It is in fact possible to have effective and privacy preserving contact tracing at scale.