The company building Ireland's contact-tracing app says the original centralised model, which was abandoned in favour of a design created by Apple and Google, would have been doomed primarily for data privacy reasons. The contact-tracing app, which is expected to be released within days, detects proximity between smartphones that use it. Apple and Google have built the technology on which the Irish app, as well as many other European contact-tracing apps, will work. “Every country based their apps on the use of centralised data — as we did with the early iterations of our apps. So the technology may not be perfect, but it is effective and available.”It also explained why it abandoned its first design attempt at the app, a “centralised” model.

Source: Irish Independent June 26, 2020 10:07 UTC