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A flood of coronavirus apps are tracking us. Now it’s time to keep track of them

MIT Technology Review – Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them. “…When we began comparing apps around the world, we realized there was no central repository of information; just incomplete, constantly changing data spread across a wide range of sources. Nor was there a single, standard approach being taken by developers and policymakers: citizens of different countries were seeing radically different levels of surveillance and transparency. So to help monitor this fast-evolving situation, we’re gathering the information into a single place for the first time with our Covid Tracing Tracker—a database to capture details of every significant automated contact tracing effort around the world. We’ve been working with a range of experts to understand what we need to look at, pulling sources including government documents, announcements, and media reports, as well as talking directly to those who are making these apps to understand the technologies and policies involved…So far we have documented 25 individual, significant automated contact tracing efforts globally, including details on what they are, how they work, and what policies and processes have been put in place around them…The most accessible version of the database exists on the page you are reading right now, and on Flourish, a data visualization service. A public version of the underlying data is kept in this read-only spreadsheet, which we update once a day at 6 p.m. US Eastern Time…”

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