This is a matter of public health in a very serious pandemic. There cannot be privacy for this to work and a little bit less privacy is a very little inconvenience in comparison of the effect of the pandemic.
The people who tested positive must be known, the people who came in close contact with them must be known. Testing, quarantines, and self-isolation must be enforced.
For tracing apps to work they must also be running on the vast majority of smartphones so this also cannot be left to the good will of people.
This is common sense. Countries and people that have understood that, e.g. Korea, Taiwan, have crushed the virus. The sooner the virus is crushed the sooner we can forget about tracing apps.
I think the distinction is whether the point of contact tracing data is for A) centralized authority to use state resources to mitigate spread B) inform private individuals whether they've been exposed and empower them to self isolate. Any reasonable assessment is going to conclude the latter does not work well for epidemiological containment, especially in places drunk on liberty.
Current successful trace and isolation systems in places with more trust in government and compliance recognized individual responsibility does not scale. America's cultural preoccupation's with muh freedom is influencing the contact tracing frame work by Google + Apple - the only one that will be ubiquitous and interoperable enough to be meaningful - hence them butting heads with various governments. One one hand delivering a minimally useful privacy preserving system is a sensible start, on the other hand, that's all it is, a start.
Governments who are serious about covid19 is going to build off this technology to to strip away the privacy pretenses and execute effective trace + isolation strategies. Many of them will also abuse it in the aftermath. It maybe the new normal, but it's not too different from the old normal.
I guess you missed the big discussion about the attempting-to-preserve-privacy Apple-Google app. You might want to read up about it before making lots of statements.
Again, the point is not just to send a text to people. The point is for the authorities to get the people's details in order to enforce a public health procedure from testing to self-isolation, as well as getting epidemiological data.
The libertarian utopia does not work at all in such a situation.
I mentioned Korea and Taiwan. You could read up about it...
The people who tested positive must be known, the people who came in close contact with them must be known. Testing, quarantines, and self-isolation must be enforced.
For tracing apps to work they must also be running on the vast majority of smartphones so this also cannot be left to the good will of people.
This is common sense. Countries and people that have understood that, e.g. Korea, Taiwan, have crushed the virus. The sooner the virus is crushed the sooner we can forget about tracing apps.