Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

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Ignoring the headline, it seems like the article equates quick, widespread adoption of these apps as “success”, and anything else as “failure”. Although it does note:

> Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well.

Despite this, it doesn’t even bother to identify the many reasons tracing apps might not be widely adopted yet, in particular privacy concerns (although it does mention that “draconian” approaches are the only ones proven to work so far, as if that proves that privacy respecting approaches can’t be useful at all.)

Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist? Personally I’ve only heard some rumblings about the Google/Apple api, and not much more, and I’m guessing I’m far more aware of the existence of these apps than many people.

Ultimately, it’s far too early to declare “failure” on this front.

Edit: According to 9to5 Mac, there are still no apps in the U.S. using the Apple/Google API as of June 18. https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/19/how-to-turn-on-off-covid-19-c...

Agreed. And I hate headlines like this that mislead their audience. Headlines must be stand-alone true as >90% of the people who happen to see the headline aren’t going to read the article. A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in.

(Which of course becomes self-reinforcing... If the vast majority of people who see the headline are led to think the apps don’t work, then they won’t want to adopt them... and low adoption is, of course, the very “failure” discussed in the first place...)

This may seem like a small thing, but the apparent license-to-lie-or-at-least-use-half-truths-in-headlines that many media editors (because editors, NOT journalists, control the headlines) believe they have is maybe the biggest problem in media accuracy we have. We are bombarded with 10-100 times as many headlines as we can possibly hope to read, which is a constant background noise of half-truths.

And yeah, of course a headline won’t be able to tell the full story. But it should be accurate enough and not misleading. The excuse of “but you have to read the full article or you’re just lazy” is a ridiculous cop-out for a license to lie.

" A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in."

That would be an entirely accurate impression, contact tracing apps have a proven track record of not working so far. That one contributing factor is the lack of buy-in in the population does not detract from that point.

During the lockdown people were paying close attention to news and gov. got all the attention it wanted.

In particular for France, regulations were passed to allow or deny activities, set curfew etc. with hefty fines associated, all of that at a few days notice at most. So, not closely following the news was not an option, and the tracing app got plenty of air time.

Now, it came after a month or two of bullshit from the health dept (“you don’t need masks, also go vote in person, it’s fine”), which itself came after half a year of protests against the gov, so most people weren’t sold on gov’s good intents on not abusing the app, especially as Apple/Google’s privacy focused solution was not adopted.

> Even more fundamental than privacy, though, is do people even know that these apps exist?

Speaking for Ireland the app was heavily publicised, and there's even a prominent "Share app" feature in the app itself.

The vision of smartphone tracing apps in April was that they were going to be a cheap and low-manpower silver bullet for contact tracing. If all they represent is a slow, limited, and mildly effective supplement to normal contact tracing, I don't think they're worth the privacy concerns in the first place.

The privacy concerns were addressed in the design of the frameworks.

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