{"id":8045,"date":"2020-05-04T09:20:20","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T15:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8045"},"modified":"2020-05-04T09:20:21","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T15:20:21","slug":"comments-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8045","title":{"rendered":"Comments on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Schneier:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

“My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I haven’t blogged about this because I thought it was obvious. But from the tweets and emails I have received, it seems not.<\/p>\n

This is a classic identification problem, and efficacy depends on two things: false positives and false negatives.<\/p>\n