Like much associated with the current pandemic, contact tracing is being pushed on not only Americans but 16 other countries and locales across Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. It is reported that there are 23 US states and territories using COVID19 contact tracing applications.
It has also been reported that the countries of Bahrain, Kuwait and Norway have abused the COVID19 contract tracing applications to invade personal privacy and going far and beyond the needs of information related to COVID19.
EHTERAZ the app used in Qatar has optional capabilities of activating live location tracking of all users or of specific individuals. There was a major security vulnerability identified in the EHTERAZ app, which exposed sensitive personal details of more than one million people. Even more troubling as the application was made a requirement for the residents of the country in May.
Immunity passports are a system of requiring people to present presumed proof of immunity to COVID-19 in order to access public spaces, work sites, airports, schools, or other venues. Several countries, including the UK, Italy, Chile, Germany,and U.S. states, California, have expressed interest in these immunity passports. Seeing as there is no current medical test for immunity from COVID19, hopefully we can put this idea to rest.
The state of California has A.B. 2004, that would authorize the issuers of COVID-19 test results to do so with digital verifiable credentials. Analysis of the bill finds -
This bill would permit an issuer of COVID-19 test results or other test results to use verifiable
credentials, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for the purpose of providing
test results to individuals. The bill would also require that verifiable credentials issued for this
purpose follow the open source W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model, including incorporation
of decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, and JavaScript Object Notation for Linked
Data (JSON-LD).
Overall, there are to many parochial interests and narrow minded attempts at using technology currently to properly address the COVID19 pandemic.