[atoav]

One could say as well: This is one of the few cases where not living in an open society where citizens have rights might save lives.

I wonder. Some of my friends don't own a smartphone. How will that contact tracing app run on their Nokia from 2010? Or will they get a smartphone from the state? How would you check if someone owns a smartphone, or whether they are pretending to have one of the old ones? If your goal is to get as many installations as possible on devices people take with them is it really the most productive thing to try forcing it?

Don't get me wrong, I do realize that propper contact tracing is the only way to deal with this virus until we got a vaccine, but I don't see how a mandatory app installment could be enforced in any western state without breaking fundamental rights. You'd literally have police knock at doors and force people to unlock their phones in order to check the installed apps, if you really want it to be installed everywhere. You would have to stop people in the street and have them show you their device AND frisk them to make sure they are not showing you a decoy device with the line: "Ooops the battery went out" or "Ooops I broke it a few minutes ago".

No – in western democracies transparency and voluntariness carries much farther. If the CCC approved any contact tracing app, even I'd immidiately install it without hesitation. If however I had to trust a closed source app by a government which tried at every turn to legalize the surveilance state I'd probably not do it. If the state would force me to do it, I would actively work against it and help others to do the same.

[heurifk]

Your overthinking it, imagining that a large part of the population wants to be Jason Bourne. It doesn't matter if 1% will evade this (you and your friends).

But you show exactly the bigger problem: the West is so individualistic, that it will rather have millions of deaths and economic collapse than a bit of privacy infringement over a number of months, again, everybody viewing himself as some sort of secret agent that the government is out to get at all costs.

Asian countries on the other hand understand that some time you need to make some real sacrifices yourself for the greater good.

[atoav]

I grew up in the alps on the countryside and I am thinking about people like my neighbour and my father. Other than them I do understand the reasoning behind contact tracing, while they don't. If they were forced to use such an app they would work against it just out of defiance. And they are by no means special people. They have no idea about computers, they are more or less center conservative or center left.

Especially in the german speaking parts of Europe the scepticism towards government data collection has historical roots that I probably don't have to elaborate on, with people who died from said collection still in living memory. While safety is a fundamental right, it doesn't outweight all the other fundamental rights automatically. These rights need to be balanced even (and especially) in times of crisis.

I think the right way here would be to follow the CCC recommendations, and make it about a voluntary utilitaristic action, rather than enforcing it from the top down. People have to want to do it, just like they did in China. How you will get them there is different in Europe however.