Every breath you take, every move you make, sang The Police in 1983. We are living it in 2020. Given that at some point, travel—especially business travel—will be back and borders will become porous, the need of the hour across the globe is to ensure safety and containment. Besides taking help from GPS-enabled maps that identify clusters, Apple and Google have joined hands to build a special software to make Bluetooth-based apps work better as most of the tracing softwares work on Bluetooth. So, who is keeping an eye on you?
Robert
This initiative by France stresses open participation, allowing citizens to join or leave anytime. The app and the back-end server database do not collect or store any personal data and has a federal structure.
Privacy meter: 5/5
OpenTrace
Used by New Zealand and Australia, this makes contact-tracing an open-source app. It allays fears of the app invading privacy and has since been given a thumbs-up by many nations.
Privacy meter: 4/5
Aarogya Setu
The Government of India recently made this app mandatory for train travel. It is also in talks with various stakeholders such as air lines and metro services to make it mandatory. Not being open-source has attracted much criticism, but the Niti Aayog has said that it is looking to make it transparent to safeguard privacy.
Privacy meter: 1/5
GitHub
A widely used control system in the world, this software is increasingly used by data scientists today. It acts as a secure repository of files that can be accessed as and when needed. Many nations are developing their own apps based on this.
Privacy meter: 3/5
TraceTogether
Adopted by Singapore
in March, this Bluetooth-based app alerts officials the moment a person tests positive for Covid-19. It then uses the Bluetooth history to call all the people in the contact list and order them to quarantine.
Privacy meter: 4/5
PEPP-PT
Germany’s Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project has drawn criticism for opening up citizens’ data to anyone who has access to the servers. Recovering from the backlash, the country is now mulling a new contact-tracing app that would safeguard privacy.
Privacy meter: 1/5
NHS Covid-19
The UK uses Bluetooth Low Energy handshakes to register proximity between smartphone users, while also factoring in duration of the ‘contact event’. It then feeds it into a clinical algorithm that would estimate infection risk and trigger possible infection notifications.
Privacy meter: 1/5
CovidApp
Developed by HypeLabs, the app can be used globally by countries who wish to have it. Colombia was the first to line up with one million downloads already. The makers are also in talks with Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and some countries in the European Union.
Privacy meter: 2/5