Immuni: there are still controversy

Immuni can’t make it works: some people don’t trust it, other say that it uses a lot of battery, other have it, but they don’t switch it on. Lights and shadows of an app that could save us from the growth of the epidemics, but it didn’t. 

What is immuni

First of all let’s make a quick summary, for who still doesn’t know it, what immuni is. This application needs to track the contacts of who was exposed to the risk to catch the virus covid-19. Through a serie of crosses of codes (to guarantee the anonymity) immuni alerts the owner of the app if another user resulted positive and they two were closed for more than fifty minutes in the previous days.

In this way a person that was alerted by immuni, but that doesn’t have symptoms, can decide to stay at home to protect the others. Or he can call the doctor to require a test in case of symptoms. 

The service uses the technology Bluetooth Low Energy: to establish the contagious infact lmmuni have to use the Bluetooth antenna but it doesn’t record the datas about the identity and the position of the user.

The application says that the datas are managed only by the Ministry of the Health and they are only saved on italian servers. 

The critics to Immuni

But the application didn’t convinced the italians. In the web there are still any polemics and doubts about the possibility that that the application can track our movements, record the personal datas, save the telephone number. Claims that are easily denied by looking the accesses of the application besides that the  Faq on the dedicated website. 

But between the many critics that there are about this app there is one about the technic. According to someone that installed it (and it’s been only 9 million of people on about 60 million, very few) the battery, with the service on, lasts less. 

But the claims are baseless. The technology Bluetooth is much lighter, therefore Immuni even uses a more recent standard, the above mentioned Bluetooth Low Energy, which uses less datas and so less energy.

The Bluetooth antenna by itself might be able to finish the battery yes, but in about fifty days. Only in some cases there was really a malfunction, which was noticed and solved with the next release of the app.

Which is the real flaw?

But Immuni has some weak points. First of all if someone results positive must enter in the app and says that he is positive by himself, so to let the app send the signs to the other users that exchanged the codes in the previous 14 days. But here they mostly refered to the good faith and to the infected abilities. The sign instead should be automatic, made by the ASL that releaved the positivity itself. 

Second point, not less important, once the user received a notification of the contagious he must be checked, to be sure he will remain at home (which is though optional according to the app, even here we might rely to the good faith of the single user). Or about the development of his health: did he really became positive or not? In this case there isn’t nothing on it and it is all sent to the family doctor or to the ASL.

Infact when the user receive a notification from immuni he must call the ASL by himself, which sends the user to the Department of Prevention. But unfortunatelly the operators are few and often overloaded of work. So it isn’t possible to activate the investigation for everyone, to determinate the real risk of contact between two users.

This post is also available in: Italiano