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Contact Tracing With Your Phone: It’s Easier but There Are Tradeoffs

The New York Times – “Lots of new app ideas are emerging to track Covid-19, but each has issues around privacy, location accuracy and how much appeal it will have to the public and to health officials…The handshake came first. Then the high-five, fist bump and more recently, the elbow touch. Canadian researchers are now working on a new greeting, the CanShake. It is not a mere salutation. The CanShake — which involves people shaking their phones at each other upon meeting to transmit contact information — is one of many emerging concepts seeking to use smartphones to do mass contact tracing to track and contain the spread of Covid-19. All involve harnessing common consumer technology to log people’s location or movements and match it against the location of people known to be sick. There are dozens of versions, many already in practice around the world, including in South Korea, Singapore, China, Italy and Israel. But in the United States, privacy concerns and absence of national policy have made the approach slower to catch on…”

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