Health Officials Say ‘No Thanks’ to Contact-Tracing Tech

Silicon Valley companies have proposed automating the arduous task of identifying people potentially exposed to Covid-19. They’re finding few takers.

WHEN APPLE AND Google announced three weeks ago that they’d developed software to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, it was a big deal. The tech giants are fierce competitors. They rarely cooperate. And together, their software controls about 3 billion smartphones, equal to almost 40 percent of the world’s population.

It seemed clever, assuming the privacy implications could be worked out. The software would silently keep track of people who’d been near someone who tested positive for the virus, prompting those contacts to be tested and quarantined if necessary. The idea was to automate part of a laborious...