[avh02]

You underestimate how important it is to (most, competent) governments to keep their citizens alive and how unprepared they were caught in this. This solution (if used) was better than flying blind and cost these governments nothing. It's not fair to pretend a government would not welcome contact tracing as-is if it helped provide a tool to stop the spread. Not everything a government does is out to surveil you, they have to still provide some other functions.

After a lid is on things though - yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll try to flip this, but not while their pants are down.

[verroq]

Then why wasn’t it used? Surely all these governments all have heard of apple/google’s superior solution. Reality undermines this argument.

[avh02]

some waited, some didn't. I can't pretend to know why.

My personal guess/opinion is that those governments who's only objective was to get people isolated on exposure would at least have leaned towards the apple/google solution when it became available. Those who had ulterior motives (or had already rolled something out) would be less likely to wait for it.

One surprise for me here is Norway's initial implementation, which it later re-evaluated[1], you'll also see (at least at that point in time) that Bahrain and Kuwait did not. Bahrain even turned it in to a game show.

Edit: just to add, you'd see for example a place like Australia looking in to the solution once available, last paragraph here[2] - my opinion is that these countries do not feel threatened by their general populace, thus don't feel the need to turn everything in to a mass surveillance tool if they don't need to

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/bahrain-kuwai...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-apps-t...