MIT Technology Review September 13, 2021
As engineers rushed to build covid apps, they left some of the most important experts out of the room, says Tufts professor and author Susan Landau.
Exposure notification apps were developed at the start of the pandemic, as technologists raced to help slow the spread of covid. The most common system was developed jointly by Google and Apple, and dozens of apps around the world were built using it—MIT Technology Review spent much of 2020 tracking them. The apps, which run on ordinary smartphones and rely on Bluetooth signals to operate, have weathered plenty of criticism over privacy worries and tech glitches. Many in the US have struggled with low numbers of downloads, while the UK recently had the opposite...