[ad_1]
The consumer protection organization Deco Proteste today put reservations about the installation of StayAway Covid on mobile phones, invoking the possibility of improper and undeclared use of personal data by Google and Apple.
The mobile application, launched today in Porto in the presence of the Prime Minister, António Costa, allows users to track, quickly and anonymously and through the physical proximity between ‘smartphones’, the networks of contagion by covid-19, informing users that They were, in the last 14 days, in the same space as someone infected with the new coronavirus. Its installation is voluntary.
“We cannot recommend the installation of StayAway Covid without reservations,” says Deco Proteste in a text posted on its portal, adding that “the decision is on the consumer’s side.”
The organization considers that “there is the possibility of undue and undeclared use of personal data by Google and Apple.”
The StayAway Covid app uses the ‘Google / Apple Exposure Notification’ system, known as GAEN, which provides access to functions at the mobile phone operating system level (Android or iOS).
According to Deco Proteste, the GAEN notification system “does not follow the principle of open source and transparency about the entities involved in data processing”, therefore “opens the door to the possibility of third parties, in particular the two technological giants ( Google and Apple), misuse and undeclared the personal data obtained “.
The mobile application, being based on the GAEN system, “does not allow full scrutiny, since the code in this part of the system is not public,” argues the consumer protection organization.
Deco Proteste welcomes, however, the option of ‘Bluetooth’ technology, to the detriment of GPS, and the voluntary nature of the ‘application’.
Even so, it indicates risks associated with the technology used, such as “failures in the recognition of mobile phones” and the “identification of false contacts with infected people”, which “can generate unnecessary anxiety”.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 851,071 deaths and infected more than 25.5 million people in 196 countries and territories, according to a report by the French news agency AFP.
In Portugal 1,824 people died of the 58,243 confirmed as infected, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate General of Health.
Covid-19 is a respiratory illness caused by a new coronavirus (type of virus) detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.
[ad_2]
