Two weeks ago, two leading American tech companies Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) announced a partnership working together on a smartphone technology that will help in tracing of persons infected with coronavirus.
Additionally, the technology will be notifying non infected persons once they come into contact or near persons who had earlier been infected with the virus.
This approach was treated with a lot of suspicion more so among European countries where a majority remained hostile about the idea.
South Korea was the first to develop an app which would help in combating spread of the virus by passing relevant information to and from smartphone users.
Technology is playing a very significant role in the war against coronavirus considering the enemy is one which can’t be seen and the virus can be passed from persons who don’t even show any slight symptoms of the disease.
Considering danger posed by this disease, many countries are now taking a u turn to support technology initiated by Google and Apple. Germany turns out to be the latest throwing its weight behind the smartphone technology.
In a joint press briefing, Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn and Chancellery Minister Helge said the country will be adopting smartphone technology for contact tracing dumping their home grown method which was giving health authorities central control over tracing data.
“This app should be voluntary, meet data protection standards and guarantee a high level of IT security. The main epidemiological goal is to recognize and break chains of infection as soon as possible,” they said.
Across Europe, many countries have adopted Bluetooth based smartphone for the activity. The Bluetooth tech works by evaluating the closeness and length of contact between people, additionally, if one tests positive, the tech informs all recent persons who have had close contact with the infected to visit a doctor and get tested.
Nonetheless, this tech has been sited of having some several flaws including not being able to provide location data of individuals.
European countries have also been arguing whether to log the contacts in an individual’s device or a central server.
