<story><title>Contact apps won&apos;t end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/contact-apps-wont-end-lockdown-but-they-might-kill-off-democracy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>papeda</author><text>This piece seems pretty short on details for such a strong claim. As far as I can tell, all concrete objections appear in this bit of text&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Who tells your phone that you’ve been diagnosed, for example? Given the possibility that – in a post-lockdown scenario – individuals with Covid-19 might be subjected to stigma, harassment or dismissal, they might be understandably reluctant to broadcast the fact. Then there’s the problem that not everyone has a smartphone, even though it’s commonly supposed in tech circles that they do. The pandemic has revealed that a significant minority of the population (mostly older people) still relies on olde-worlde feature phones. Moreover, it turns out that not all smartphones are created equal: one estimate is that 50% of all smartphones can’t use the proximity-sensing systems being developed by Apple and Google.&lt;p&gt;...which is followed by a hand-wavey &amp;quot;I could go on but you get the point&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;All three complaints are about how effective the solution might be, not actual reasons why it would &amp;quot;kill democracy&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Contact apps won&apos;t end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/contact-apps-wont-end-lockdown-but-they-might-kill-off-democracy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dleslie</author><text>Such a system is just a single subpoena or a single piece of child-saving legislation away from being used by law enforcement.&lt;p&gt;I pity the poor sod who is incarcerated because they happened to innocently walk past the scene of a crime, and roughly fit the description of the alleged perpetrator.</text></comment>