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Get ready: In the coming weeks, you can expect to be filled with incentives to install contact tracking apps on your smartphones. Systems use Bluetooth to identify and list the other phones you approach with during the day. If the owner of one of those phones becomes infected with COVID-19, you will receive an alert. The plan is for him to isolate himself later, preventing him from infecting others.
The idea of such a system is not new: there was a simple version of the app that made the rounds at a UK university a decade ago. But this time, the launch of TraceTogether in Singapore has convinced the world that this is the best option for tracking digital contacts. Then a week ago, Apple and Google announced that they would standardize the technology and make it available to everyone. Well, almost everything.
Apple and Google sold their stake as a privacy control measure, a means to prevent governments around the world from straining to track contracts as a data collection tool to track millions of phones in their countries. Also, the two US tech giants. USA They can bind the underlying Bluetooth framework to their operating systems, making it secure, low-power, and easy to run. The applications that use this framework will be developed and operated by national health agencies, complying with the rules established by Apple and Google, with built-in data protection.
For this system to work, it is widely believed that somewhere around 60% of a nation’s smartphone users will need to install and run the app. That is the greatest impediment to such programs being successful. With that in mind, Google and Apple will update iOS and Android smartphones through major OS updates, rather than relying on any user action. In the case of Google, this will be done through an update of its Google Play Services, integrated into Android.
However, that’s a problem for some 600 million Android users in China and for anyone who has purchased a Huawei phone released after the US blacklist. USA Against the company, specifically, the Mate 30 and P40. Google’s full Android is banned in China, the open source version is used instead, and new Huawei devices are stuck with it, much as they wish Google would come back.
A week after the announcement by Google and Apple, it is now clear that there is no short-term solution for China or Huawei. Those phones will have to do without unless and until that changes. In response to this, Huawei told me that “it is encouraging to see that technology plays a key role in addressing this global problem.”We believe that technology must be open and available to everyone. Only then can we use technology to advance the world and make it a better place. “
Google expects around 80% of Android phones outside of China to be able to use the new framework. The company has said it will Post a framework for unsupported Android devices, including Huawei phones and one supposed other phones in China, to replicate the official tracking system. All of that will take longer, there is no clarity on how much longer.
China has no interest in the implementation of an international privacy contact search system on the phones of its citizens. You have your own solutions for phone tracking that work well and don’t have any of the impediments seen elsewhere.
However, for Huawei, this is more of a problem. The company wants to promote its support to countries facing the pandemic and tells me that “we have maintained network operations worldwide in the midst of this critical situation. Our 5G technologies and video conferencing systems have been implemented in some hospitals to provide fast and reliable communication, and our AI-assisted quantitative medical image analysis service is helping to shorten diagnostic time. “
The Mate 30 has not sold well outside of China as a result of Google’s loss, and there is little expectation that the P40 will do better. Huawei has its own problems stemming from its ties to Beijing and the backlash against what is seen as China’s lack of transparency in the early stages of the pandemic. In that sense, this is kind of like a side show. But Huawei is the third largest smartphone provider in the world and has a large user base in Europe. Most users are now on devices released before the US blacklist. USA But for those considering an upgrade, this could be an additional factor that pushes them to look elsewhere.
