I won't be using it either, but for entirely different reasons.
First off, those that insist that it is designed to not track or identify individuals are correct. I've read enough of the technical documentation to understand that much. I also trust Apple to keep Google honest on this effort.
What concerns me most about the app and one reason I won't use it is that, it is a foot the door to a slippery slope, one of which if we let it go too far, we can never undo. The current iteration of the app is fine, but what about the next, or the one after that?
But primarily why I won't use it is because it has no valid use to me. I've been in 44 states since the virus became known, and have been in contact with literally thousands of people. I know I've been exposed to COVID, probably many, many times. It would be statistically impossible for me to not have been. I don't need an app to tell me that. I distance, stay away from outwardly sick people and wear a mask indoors. That is enough for me. I'm fine.
I do see a valid use for the app, and that is for the vulnerable out there due to medical conditions. They can use some help.
So you admit that there is no privacy concern here, and you admit that the app is incredibly useful to the 75% of the US population who has one or more of the "pre-existing conditions" which increase their susceptibility to the short-term effects of this virus. Good!
Now, let's build on that.
How do you imagine this being useful to high-risk individuals if only those who think they are high-risk use it?
As you've read and understood the technical approach of the exposure notification system, I trust you are also technically literate enough to know what "network effects" are. But let me boil it down for you. Contact tracing doesn't protect the person who has the disease (it is too late for that obviously), nor so much the person who they came in contact with (although they might receive earlier treatment); contact tracing saves
the potential contacts of the maybe-uninfected contact. So, let's put a vulnerable person there.
Call her Sally Jones, who is a grandmother (elderly: risk factor 1) who is overweight (risk factor 2, affecting bout 30% of US adults). Tomorrow night Sally is going to sit down to dinner with Abby Jones, her grandaughter. Abby has no risk factors that she knows of. Abby was sitting on a park bench having a nice conversation with Fred Smith two days ago, who also thinks he is a "low risk" individual but actually has undiagnosed hyptertension (his risk factor, which affects well over 50% of US adults even though it is positively diagnosed only in about half that, 25%). Fred, in turn, is at home with a fever and just got a call from his doctor confirming his positive COVID test. Unbeknownst to her, Abby had breathed in a large enough number of virus particles to have started an infection of COVID herself, for which she is not (yet) showing any symptoms.
Now, if exposure notifications were ubiquitous, Abby would get an immediate notification on her phone saying she had been in prolonged contact with an infected individual in the past couple days. She would, being a loving granddaughter, respectfully and regretfully call off her dinner with Sally. Two days from now, perhaps Abby takes a test prophylactically, or perhaps she starts showing symptoms and takes a test. She quite likely has saved Sally's life. Happy ending!
But if Fred isn't in contact tracing, because he doesn't know he has hypertension, then none of this happens and Sally ends up infected. Same thing if Abby declines contact tracing because she accurately thinks she has no risk factors and doesn't regard herself as a "frequent" visitor to her overweight grandmother.
This is a classic case of network effects. The more people are in the system, the more effective it will be. Bowing out because, selfishly, the system doesn't directly benefit you, is sociopathic.
Moreover, let's talk about Abby. When she has a low-impact "just a heavy cold" bout with COVID, is that all that happened? We know from the medical literature already that in
many cases the long-term effects of COVID end up being more significant than the short-term effects. Those include cardiovascular issues from system-wide blood-clots, "brain fog" and other neurological issues, recurring lethargy, etc, that last at least months ("at least" because there are a good number of people who have been living with these "secondary" symptoms now for nine months and we don't know if they will
ever go away).
All in all, please reconsider. You know there is literally no downside here, and have admitted as much. The only downside is the
potential that
someday someone might use this program being successful as justification for a system that really does have problems. That is, you think future people will just lose all ability to think this through themselves. Is that "slippery slope fallacy" so compelling to you that it outweighs the disease and deaths that you acknowledge will happen if contact tracing isn't successful?
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