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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

Why does every country has to reinvent a wheel by building their own contact tracing apps (and failing in respecting privacy by doing so)? Wasn't there already one app open sourced, and if I'm not mistaken, it was made in EU, so GDPR compliance is guaranteed. Not to mention solutions provided by Google and Apple, but I cannot comment on GDPR compliance for those.

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Because then the politicians wouldn't be able to over-pay their friends software development companies to reinvent the wheel, produce a broken product, then get paid an extreme amount of money to fix issues that should have never existed in the first place.

Look at the crap show that was the development of Australia's COVIDSafe App. Huge bugs and security issues months after the release with no intention of fixing them.

NIPH (Norwegian Institute of Public Health) has contracted Netcompany, the team behind the danish contact tracing app), to build it. https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2020/netcompany-to-develop-app-fo... So they won’t be starting quite from scratch.

Bunnie Huang wrote a good piece on how Apple/Google's Exposure Notification stuff doesn't allow as much determination of who got infected by who compared to more complete (but less privacy respecting) Contact Tracing:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5820

Estonian contact tracing app was built pro bono publico by several app development companies and is open source. All code available here: https://koodivaramu.eesti.ee/tehik/hoia

Have to note it is based on the Swiss DP^3T system: https://github.com/DP-3T

Singapore open-sourced their app, and Australia basically took the code and used it.

Haven't really heard much about the app any more. Now it's all QR codes. I don't think the apps work that well with Apple's bluetooth permissions...

Australia then proceeded to bury its use. No references to it any of the updates, for months, never a question until a recent test when they asked if we have the app installed.

That they couldn't make it work on iPhone, to have it run in the background, was probably what sealed it. No such issues on Android.

> and Australia basically took the code and used it.

Australia basically paid $6million to a contracting company to take the Singapore code and badly reuse it... It was a pork barrelling rort from the start.

The one good thing to come out of it was a learned a lot more about how to use Ghidra to reverse Android apks... (I had a great deal of fun, along with a group of other people, seeing just where the .au app differed from the .sg GitHub code...)

Two, at least; the German and Irish ones. A number of countries and US states are now using apps derived from the Irish one.

NearForm have done a lot of work on this: https://github.com/nearform

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