https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02130-6
For all the controversy over decentralized contact-tracing apps, data show that these privacy-preserving tools saved thousands of lives during the pandemic. National and international authorities must invest in the technology now.
These estimated that, in just three months, the app prevented 284,000 or 594,000 cases, respectively — despite only 28% of the population in those regions using it. The study also suggested that for every 1% increment in app usage, the number of cases could be reduced by 0.8% and 2.3%, respectively.
The most compelling evidence yet, however, comes from an analysis published earlier this year of the usage and impact of the NHS COVID-19 app in its first year of deployment10. It found that the app prevented around one million infections and saved more than 9,600 lives in England and Wales between September 2020 and September 2021. And it achieved this even though, on average over the year, only around 25% of the population was using it (see ‘What the data say’).
Honestly, I did think the contact exposure apps were a failure. I almost never got notifications, despite leaving them always on, and legitimately it sounds like adoption was low. But it sounds like they were still having a noticeable effect.
Unfortunantly this kind of data will be misused. I remember there was a big push from my governemnt to use contact tracing apps. Only to find out later that police were using it in investigations.
What government/country was this, out of curiosity? I thought the whole point of the local-storage-only approach was protecting privacy, so curious how it could be used in investigations.
well, that's the centralised implementation, which i also don't like. iirc there's a decentralised implementation where, instead of tracking your location and sending it to a central server, each device would have a uuid. whenever you come near someone, both of your devices would just swap uuids and take note of them, and if either of you catches covid, they can just open that list of collected uuids and use that to notify the people who came into contact with them. imo not only is this more privacy-friendly, but it saves infrastructure costs from not having to host centralised servers.
Got a source for that? The approach google and Apple implemented was completely anonymous, even with rolling identifiers.
It was not the Google/Apple implementation. They were government funded apps which used a centralised db.
https://thewest.com.au/politics/law-and-order/wa-police-accessed-contact-tracing-data-c-3118717