the Spanish app to control the pandemic releases its code – Explica

COVID radar It is the Spanish app to control the pandemic caused by the coronavirus, the one in which we have been immersed since last March, which is said soon. To be more exact, it is the app with which the Government will try to improve the tracking of infections and predict possible outbreaks. It is nothing new because similar strategies have been carried out in half the world for a long time, but it is for which it has been bet in Spain.

The app, available for Android and iOS, has been in test mode for a few weeks and It is expected that on September 15 it will be launched throughout the State. However, despite the fact that from official instances it is expected that the application will be used en masse for the help it can provide and there are international trials that support it to deal with the expansion of COVID-19, Radar COVID continues to be a tracking system, also managed by the government itself.

In other words, it is an invention that does not inspire confidence in terms of privacy, which is why the SEDIA (Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence), the body in charge of developing Radar COVID, promised to release the code source of all software, in order to provide the transparency that only open source offers. And they have fulfilled: Radar COVID can already be considered as free software.

The description of Radar COVID is concise and insistent on the subject of privacy:

Radar COVID notifies you anonymously of the possible contact that you have had in the last 14 days with a person who has been infected using Bluetooth low consumption technology.

COVID radar also allows:

Anonymously communicate your positive diagnosis Anonymously communicate the exposure to people with whom you have been in contact

Radar COVID guarantees security and privacy and is 100% anonymous. For this reason, we do not request your name, your telephone number, or your email.

Radar COVID also ensures that does not collect any geolocation, GPS or temporary dataTherefore, the information stored is only used for the repeated warning between possible risky contacts, but not to identify anyone in principle. In the end, the release of the source code is the act of guaranteeing that everything that is sustained is as is. And there is no reason to doubt that this is the case.

COVID Radar for Android

Radar COVID, in fact, is not a development from scratch, but relies on Apple and Google tracking APIs for coronavirus and other open technologies. All the components of the project are available on GitHub, including the server software and that of the mobile applications for Android and iOS, whose download can already be found on Google Play and the App Store, respectively, although as indicated, in principle it still does not operate throughout the national territory.

As for the license, the one chosen has been Mozilla Public License 2.0, so we can call it both free software and open source software.

It has been more or less controversial with the privacy implications that this release of the Radar COVID code comes to mitigate, the truth is that the main obstacles that the application faces in its attempt to reach the more homes the better, are its discovery and conditionality. That is, that people know the application and install it. And although it is surely promoted by all possible channels, you have to make the effort to find and install it, which is optional.

Not only that: the application pulls the Bluetooth and, as is evident, it is always active in the background, with the increase in consumption that all this entails. Then there is the handling of the application itself, since it does not only consist of having it installed and activated: it is essential to use it -Its operation is very simple- and, for example, in the case of being diagnosed as positive for COVID-19, raise the alarm voluntarily. It will be necessary to see if it becomes massive as expected or not.

Despite this, and also despite the fact that its deployment at the national level has not yet been completed, Radar COVID already has several million installations and a positive average rating in the two large mobile application stores.

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the Spanish app to control the pandemic releases its code - Explica