Some countries want central databases for contact-tracing apps

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BY EARLY APRIL, as covid-19 spread around the world and lockdown gripped Europe, many of its governments had started building contact-tracing apps. They hoped to use smartphones to track people’s contact with each other, and to pinpoint who might have been infected. Apple and Google tried to help. They started working together to rewrite the Bluetooth protocols in their phones so that apps could gather contact data in the background, from both iPhones and Android devices, without interfering with the normal operation of the phone or running down its battery.