The Immuni application for tracking contacts against the coronavirus has been available throughout Italy for about ten days and, according to the latest data communicated by the government, has been downloaded on about 3.5 million smartphones. In the intentions of its designers and health institutions, the app should help reduce the risk of new infections, but according to several observers its adoption by the population is taking place slowly and in the absence of clear promotion and communication from the part. of the government.
Immuni has been available for iOS and Android since the beginning of June, but for the first week it had only been tested in Abruzzo, Liguria, Marche and Puglia with the aim of verifying its functionality, before extending its use to the rest of Italy starting from 15 June. By the government's own admission, the application is still running in and may receive some updates in the coming weeks, to improve its functionality.
Italy was the first major European country to equip itself with a contact tracking application based on BLE (a Bluetooth system) made available by Apple and Google, which in recent months had worked to update their operating systems using a technology originally intended for other purposes, such as allowing a pair of wireless headphones to connect to your iPhone or Android smartphone. Other countries have chosen to use the same system, creating applications similar to Immuni and which are starting to be adopted by the population. The response so far has varied from country to country, with a considerable amount of downloads in Germany.
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Immuni does not collect information on its geographical position and limits itself to capturing the identification codes (ID) transmitted by the other smartphones that use it. If a person tests positive for coronavirus, they can report their condition to the system through a healthcare provider, so that the application can then alert the people they had come into contact with, or shared the same spaces with for a certain period of time. . We've explained the history and how Immuni works more extensively here.
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The passage with the health worker serves to certify the actual positivity, ascertained by swab tests, and reduces the risk of reports by mistake or joke by users. The report is on a voluntary basis and does not involve the transmission of any personal data on the person who tested positive: whoever receives a notification from Immuni will only know that he was close to an infected person, but will never know who it was.
Despite the reassurances on the protection of personal data, disseminated both by the Privacy Guarantor and by various IT security experts, for now there seems to have been a moderate interest in the application. The Minister for Technological Innovation and Digitization, Paola Pisano, explained that the government has not yet “entered the heart of the communication campaign” on Immuni, but has not provided much other information on plans and times to promote more direct use of the application.
At the moment the number of reports from Immuni is not known, but in recent days there has been a lot of talk about a case in Puglia, indicated by several newspapers as the first automatically indicated by the app. A 63-year-old woman from Bari was subjected to the swab after she received a warning about a possible exposure to the coronavirus, the result of the probable sharing of some spaces with an infected person. The woman then tested negative but the story is not very clear, also because the person concerned had denied having had any contact outside the small circle of people she usually frequents.
In general, the usefulness of contact tracing apps depends on how many people decide to download and activate them: the more individuals use applications like Immuni, the more they can prove useful in slowing the spread of the infection. For this reason, the government is confident that in the coming weeks the application will be downloaded by a greater number of people, even if so far there has been no adequate promotion to act as an incentive.
