Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
When Albion College announced it would be re-opening back in June it said it would put a number of health measures in place to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, including reduced lecture sizes, and virus tests for staff and students. But as TechCrunch reports in a new investigation, it also introduced a mandatory contact-tracing app with a number of privacy issues. The report highlights the problems facing these apps and the institutions that are introducing them, and it’s well worth a read as a case study.
The app, called Aura, is designed to alert the school when a student tests positive for the virus and to let students know when they may have come into contact with someone else who has it. But rather than relying on local Bluetooth…