Will you download the contact tracing app?

El Weirdo

Sardonicat wrote: »

If people are ignoring being informed by current contact tracing why would they pay attention to an app?

At the moment, if someone is contacted by the contact tracing team, they are more than likely getting that phone call out of the blue. Some of these people, for whatever reasons, choose not to accept the offer of a test.

With the app, you have to actively download the thing and also actively choose to provide your number for the HSE to contact you in the event you are in contact with a +ive infection. If you are prepared to do that, then I would imagine you would be more likely to take up the offer of a test.

JimmyVik

I think its great that ill get a call when ive been near a positive case. Helps me protect my family and friends if i know ive been exposed. Unless that positive case doesnt have the app installed.
This app can only help. It will save lives.

GarIT

murpho999 wrote: »

How do you know if they have good data? Why isn't this extra data beneficial..

How do you know that people are ignoring current contract tracing?

Just because you think that people are not doing the right thing (anything to back that up?) does not mean that we should stop with initiatives to help combat the virus.

It has been all over RTE that 35% of people offered tests through contact tracing have refused.

We can guess that the people that refuse were less likely to have a lot of contact and weren't feeling symptoms. You can still be a carrier without symptoms of course. But it's better than nothing.

plodder

Hannibal_Smith wrote: »

Perhaps review is the wrong word, I'm not technical so I'm not sure what word to use. But the information goes to somewhere in Galway where the data is *insert proper word* (collated or something). And a notification is sent to other devices with the app that you've been within 2m of for more than 10-15 mins.

I don't think that is entirely accurate though. Sure, the collation or whatever is right. The data is put somewhere that is accessible to other phones. But, there is no way for a notification to be "sent to other devices with the app that you've been within 2m of for more than 10-15 mins" because that information does not exist centrally.

All phones just download the data regularly and it's on the phone where the software finds out you were in contact with someone because their id is in your contacts list.

It's a subtle difference. The end result is much the same, but from a privacy perspective, the HSE doesn't find out anything about you unless you have registered your phone number.

GarIT

plodder wrote: »

I don't think that is entirely accurate though. Sure, the collation or whatever is right. The data is put somewhere that is accessible to other phones. But, there is no way for a notification to be "sent to other devices with the app that you've been within 2m of for more than 10-15 mins" because that information does not exist centrally.

All phones just download the data regularly and it's on the phone where the software finds out you were in contact with someone because their id is in your contacts list.

It's a subtle difference. The end result is much the same, but from a privacy perspective, the HSE doesn't find out anything about you unless you have registered your phone number.

I'll explain. If you test positive. You send your device IDs to the HSE. The HSE publish a list of infected device IDs every 2 hours. Each individual phone will compare it's list of ID contacts with the HSE's list of infected IDs. And your phone, not the HSE will alert you. If you have entered your number, when your phone finds a match it will then, and only then send your number to the HSE to call you.

DebDynamite

I downloaded the app, however i’m only running iOS 12 on my phone, the contract tracing part requires iOS 13. Shame. I’d say they’ll be a fair few people like me who will be included in the numbers of users who’ve downloaded, but it’s essentially useless

Sardonicat

Sardonicat wrote: »

Or how about we comtinue with the restrictions, observe hygiene and social distancing guidelines until such a time as a vaccine is developed? An app is not going to prevent a new surge. People being identified via contact tracing now are not presenting for testing . This app isn't going to change that, just make people even more complacent. It's an excuse for opening up before we are ready and we will rue the day.

I am sorry but that is just nonsense. We may never get a vaccine so life has to go on. This is a tool to enable the minimising of risk and identifying potential at risk people. We also dont need this to be 100% effective to be effective. Everything that reduces transmission is useful - awareness, apps, handwashing, masks in confined spaces.....all reduce the transmission and achieving a 50% reduction in opportunities for infection is probably enough to keep this under control. So instead of lamenting the potential escapes, we should be lauding that we allows a potential path to normality

murpho999

GarIT wrote: »

It has been all over RTE that 35% of people offered tests through contact tracing have refused.

We can guess that the people that refuse were less likely to have a lot of contact and weren't feeling symptoms. You can still be a carrier without symptoms of course. But it's better than nothing.

OK, so if true that means that 65% of people did and that's a significant majority.

I don't see why people just think the app won't help because a minority do not do something.

Either way, I'd expect people who have downloaded the app to be the type willing to co-operate and avail of any tests being offered.

plodder

GarIT wrote: »

I'll explain. If you test positive. You send your device IDs to the HSE. The HSE publish a list of infected device IDs every 2 hours. Each individual phone will compare it's list of ID contacts with the HSE's list of infected IDs. And your phone, not the HSE will alert you. If you have entered your number, when your phone finds a match it will then, and only then send your number to the HSE to call you.

Yes, that's what I said. I think it's important to know that contact tracing works without registering your phone number, but if you register your number you get a call, and the HSE find out that you are a contact.

murpho999

DebDynamite wrote: »

I downloaded the app, however i’m only running iOS 12 on my phone, the contract tracing part requires iOS 13. Shame. I’d say they’ll be a fair few people like me who will be included in the numbers of users who’ve downloaded, but it’s essentially useless

77% of iOS devices have iOS 13 installed in January, so it does not mean that the app is useless.Link

Just update to iOS 13 if you can, it's a stable release now.

El Weirdo

plodder wrote: »

Yes, that's what I said. I think it's important to know that contact tracing works without registering your phone number, but if you register your number you get a call, and the HSE find out that you are a contact.

I didn't bother registering my phone number. If I get a notification I certainly won't be hanging around waiting for the HSE to ring me.

Hannibal_Smith

plodder wrote: »

I don't think that is entirely accurate though. Sure, the collation or whatever is right. The data is put somewhere that is accessible to other phones. But, there is no way for a notification to be "sent to other devices with the app that you've been within 2m of for more than 10-15 mins" because that information does not exist centrally.

All phones just download the data regularly and it's on the phone where the software finds out you were in contact with someone because their id is in your contacts list.

It's a subtle difference. The end result is much the same, but from a privacy perspective, the HSE doesn't find out anything about you unless you have registered your phone number.

It says on the app

If someone you've been in close contact with tests positive for Covid 19, the app will send you a close contact alert. The HSE will also phone you if you've provided your number below.

The app is on your phone, so it does send it to your device via the app. If you don't have the app it can't let you know? That was my take anyhow, but admittedly and as I say, I am not in anyway technical.

It doesn't say anything about accessing your contacts list? And they certainly didn't say that at the briefing this morning. Unless you mean contact list as collated by the app?

GarIT

Hannibal_Smith wrote: »

It says on the app

If someone you've been in close contact with tests positive for Covid 19, the app will send you a close contact alert. The HSE will also phone you if you've provided your number below.

The app is on your phone, so it does send it to your device via the app. If you don't have the app it can't let you know? That was my take anyhow, but admittedly and as I say, I am not in anyway technical.

It doesn't say anything about accessing your contacts list? And they certainly didn't say that at the briefing this morning. Unless you mean contact list as collated by the app?

Contacts list as in list of devices you have been in contact with. Not the contacts list of phone numbers you save on your phone.

The app will notify you, not the HSE. It's not sent to the app, it comes from the app, which is in your phone. Then if you have entered your number it will send your number to the HSE.

To address privacy concerns they have made everything decentralised. Each phone does the work and stores the data rather than a central system.

Hannibal_Smith

Sardonicat wrote: »

Or how about we comtinue with the restrictions, observe hygiene and social distancing guidelines until such a time as a vaccine is developed? An app is not going to prevent a new surge. People being identified via contact tracing now are not presenting for testing . This app isn't going to change that, just make people even more complacent. It's an excuse for opening up before we are ready and we will rue the day.

Well the app should be used in conjunction with everyone else. For example, if you haven't been within 2 m of someone for more than 15 mins, you app should never go off.

But could you guarantee that you will never be within 2m of someone?

Bob24

My Apple account is not on the Irish App Store as I was not in Ireland when I created it and don't want to change it ... and the tracing App isn't available to me as it only seems to be published on the Irish App Store.

That is pretty silly as there must be a good number of people in Ireland using iPhones with non-Irish Apple accounts, and all the government needs to do to publish the App to them is to tick the box for all countries when they submit it to Apple (no extra work or cost involved, and most Irish private's and public organisations do that).

GarIT

Bob24 wrote: »

My Apple account is not on the Irish App Store as I was not in Ireland when I created it and don't want to change it ... and the tracing App isn't available to me as it only seems to be published on the Irish App Store.

That is pretty silly as there must be a good number of people in Ireland using iPhones with non-Irish Apple accounts, and all the government needs to do to publish the App to them is to tick the box for all countries when they submit it to Apple (no extra work or cost involved, and most Irish private's and public organisations do that).

Google and Apple have banned having more than one app per region to avoid confusion. I'm interested to find out what happens when the UK want to publish their app when we are already the official app for the UK store.

They also wouldn't want false download numbers or people downloading it elsewhere and ticking the I have symptoms box.

fly_agaric

KyussB wrote: »

I believe that when uploading your UID's after infection, the app doesn't filter them it just uploads the lot of them - then sends the lot of them to all other app users - and the other app users compare them against their contacts list.

So, there wouldn't be added information to track, other users would just match multiple UID's from you if they were in contact.

I realise that and it wasn't what I was getting at. If the unique codes change too fast they cannot (on their own) represent contact. More work must be done somewhere, maybe by your own phone but then that will mean gathering more information from the devices surrounding it than just broadcast of random nonidentifying code. All getting a bit abstruse and I think we are talking past each other. I need to do more reading about this anyway.

Pauliedragon

NDWC wrote: »

Anyone who doesn't download this is a selfish ****, simple as that

I've been trying for 12 hours now with no luck. Maybe the HSE should have done a bit more. I've spoken to several people with Huawei phones today who are having trouble too. App not available in your country is the massage. Don't judge people too quickly. Last time I checked my address it was in Ireland.

Bob24

GarIT wrote: »

Google and Apple have banned having more than one app per region to avoid confusion. I'm interested to find out what happens when the UK want to publish their app when we are already the official app for the UK store.

Not having multiple apps for one country is one thing. But are you sure they are going as far as banning other countries' App from a country's App Store?

I just picked few random countries and I can for example see the ones for Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Australia in the App Store even though my accounts isn't in these countries.

average_runner

Sardonicat wrote: »

It's useless if a sizeable proportion ignore being alerted to exposure, which is already happening.

You can only bring them to river, you can't force them to drink it

seamus

450,000 downloads now. Be well over half a million by the end of the day.

is_that_so

Pauliedragon wrote: »

I've been trying for 12 hours now with no luck. Maybe the HSE should have done a bit more. I've spoken to several people with Huawei phones today who are having trouble too. App not available in your country is the massage. Don't judge people too quickly. Last time I checked my address it was in Ireland.

Are you on an Irish network? Friend on home country network has a similar issue.

average_runner

Pauliedragon wrote: »

I've been trying for 12 hours now with no luck. Maybe the HSE should have done a bit more. I've spoken to several people with Huawei phones today who are having trouble too. App not available in your country is the massage. Don't judge people too quickly. Last time I checked my address it was in Ireland.

That's not down to the HSE, that is your phone configuration.

robinph

seamus wrote: »

450,000 downloads now. Be well over half a million by the end of the day.

That's got to make it one of the highest take ups of any of the apps released so far.

Does the publicity about how rubbish the UK app and general response is help in the take up in a general underlying concept of "well we can't be as crap as them so best download it"?

circadian

Pauliedragon wrote: »

I've been trying for 12 hours now with no luck. Maybe the HSE should have done a bit more. I've spoken to several people with Huawei phones today who are having trouble too. App not available in your country is the massage. Don't judge people too quickly. Last time I checked my address it was in Ireland.

I remember last year Huawei devices being banned from the Google Store. Not sure of the extent or if it's still in place but that could be part of the problem.

Stewball

I have a Huawei phone and had no issues downloading it.

El Weirdo

circadian wrote: »

I remember last year Huawei devices being banned from the Google Store. Not sure of the extent or if it's still in place but that could be part of the problem.

Something like that was mentioned on Morning Ireland this morning.

circadian

"Coronavirus Contact Tracing: Evaluating The Potential Of Using Bluetooth Received Signal Strength For Proximity Detection"


Here's a study on the Bluetooth technology used by researchers in Trinity.


https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/bluetooth_rssi_study.pdf


Much more substance to this than hypothetical Bluetooth sniffing drones to obtain anonymised data that would have little to no use outside of contact tracing.

Away With The Fairies

Has anyone got a notification of being a possible contact yet?

circadian

Away With The Fairies wrote: »

Has anyone got a notification of being a possible contact yet?

I'd say it'll be a couple of days before uptake and the data starts to be useful.