As announced previously, the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation has launched an application called ‘Gosuslugi. Covid Tracker’ to track contacts with coronavirus patients all around Russia.
Users diagnosed with COVID-19 must independently report this anonymously through the application. In turn, users with whom this person came in close contact in the last 14 days will receive a notification with the date of contact. In this case, patient data is not transmitted or displayed.
The app uses the Exposure Notification technology developed jointly by Apple and Google. With the help of Bluetooth, it allows you to fix the devices of other users, exchanging random keys with them.
The app is available on both App Store and Google Play.
Users’ first reactions have been contrasted. While user Andrey Pastushenko wrote on Google Play that he prefers such an app to yet another lockdown, another user who names himself Jack Ryall said he has “no trust to the publisher.”
“A long-awaited application that did not live up to expectations,” commented user Mihail Bobylkin. “The ‘privacy policy’ requires you to agree to the collection of personal data without specifying specified which data. I didn’t approve these privacy statements, as a result I can’t use the app.”
A series of bugs was noticed by Boris Ovchinnikov, a leading Russian digital market analysts, in a Facebook post.
