Deactivate the app Smittestopp at once – with good conscience, Joacim Lund writes in Aftenposten. This should rather give him a bad conscience.
The app Smittestopp collects people’s movement patterns to track the spread of covid-19. Privacy is important, and that is why we should take it seriously when The Norwegian Data Protection Authority (DPA) protests against the app’s storage and handling of data. Only 11 percent of Norway’s population used the app, when the data collection was stopped. That is far from the necessary 50 percent to get a real overview of the spread of the disease.
This is in contrast to the fact that many of us use Google Maps, which is also collecting location data, so that we can find the quickest way to our holiday cabins.
What is more important, the holiday cabin or our health? Can we combine good privacy and trust in government to see the effect of and limit the measures against covid-19? The Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Simula did a fantastic job with Smittestopp. The app should be developed with better security and anonymization, but to wish Smittestopp dead is wrong. To gather and share data for our common health is important, in immediate crises like covid-19 and against societal challenges like cancer.
Smittestopp is dead. Long live Smittestopp.
