Do we need a Contact Tracing App?
The goal of this paper is to shed some light on the usefulness of a contact tracing smartphone app for the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. We review the basics of contact tracing during the spread of a virus, we contextualize the numbers to the case of COVID-19 and we analyse the state of the art for proximity detection using Bluetooth Low Energy. Our contribution is to assess if there are scientific evidences that suggest a contact tracing app, using present technologies, could be effective to slow down the spread of the virus. Our conclusion is that such evidences are lacking, and we should re-think the introduction of such a privacy-invasive measure.
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