Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#61

Post by rurban » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

As I expected it's backdoored. It uses the new central Google Tracking ID feature. https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android/wiki/4-Go...

Other apps can do without central tracking Id's. It was fishy that Germany waited weeks for this Google API (officially to support low voltage Bluetooth), whilst other countries had their open source apps ready for long. Germany and France pushed for centralized tracking, it was called off after protests, now its again in via their US friends.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#62

Post by zxienin » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #51

metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Wow, those are not two companies that come to mind when "moving fast" is a priority. (I've only worked in a supplier role to Deutsche Telekom, but I can't imagine SAP is any less ... specific about rules and processes.) I guess they probably have some "experimental" departments for recruitment purposes, they must have used those.

When serious data privacy and protection concerns are in play, German govt. banking on these is no surprise.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#63

Post by zxienin » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

Having spent some time looking at contact tracing app architectures across the world, I realize how conceptually same they are. Mostly variations are in central or decentral handling of data.

BLE based. Similar usage protocol.

Instead of 50 odd countries, each making tracing app with ~90% similarity, doesn’t it make sense that there is one grand GitHub repo? Each country instantiates their own variant of it, by injecting own config, while contributing to the this repo.

Am surprised at the mushrooming effect here.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#64

Post by zxienin » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

konschubert wrote: post #52

metachris wrote: post #3

Some context: > The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and…

Ah, the two most expensive, most corporate, software development consultancies Germany has to offer.

Corporate - ok. Most expensive? Are there less expensive, yet better ones around?

And btw: none are software dev consultancies. SAP sells enterprise software. DT is into telecommunications with some data center presence.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#65

Post by Lutger » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

bennofs wrote: post #56

Lutger wrote: post #44

Most European countries develop their contract tracing apps as open source software. The fragmented landscape is unfortunate. It's not just the code being developed that could benefit from a cooperative approach, the ethical, legal, medical and governance issues around these apps could benefit a lot from a shared European approach. We have done this with the GDPR, we should collaborate on this as well.

At this scale, collaboration would probably slow things down more than it helps. Finding a consensus among so many parties is hard. Building separate solutions first and then unifying them later might be better.

Maybe. I just don't understand why European developers didn't start by forking the austrian app, which has an apache license.

The Stopp Corona app is developed by the Austrian red cross and has already been successfully deployed and used. There's a lot of experience around it.

Why not begin with a fork and add your own requirements? Then slowly try to merge those upstream? Now the landscape is fragmented from the start. It's NIH all over the place.

Re: Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

#66

Post by huxley » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 12:39 PM UTC

zabana wrote: post #45

mikece wrote: post #13

I wonder how quickly contact tracing applications will be leveraged for other uses. If a significant number of protesters are using such an application then I imagine government will throw the “for your protection“ excuse to go harvest information from the phones of protesters to see who was meeting with him and who their social circles are. Of course, to keep us and our children safe.

It's already happened in the wake of the events related to the unfortunate death of George Floyd. Police in minneapolis have admitted the use of contact tracing technology to locate protesters.

My understanding is that that was the police grabbing cell phone tower records from the cell service providers -- which they've always been able to do, it is a different (though still problematic) issue. The writers of the article conflated it with contact tracing.