goodbye to covid radar. The ‘app’ with which the Government hoped to control infections in the hardest moments of the pandemic is no longer operational. This is how the platform has communicated it to users through a message inside, in which it is noted that the application will end its activity on October 9, 2022: «As of this date, its functionalities ceased to be operational ».
Although the deadline is not met until tomorrow, the ‘app’ no longer allows the user to enter any positive code for Covid inside it, as this newspaper has verified, which implies that it is no longer functional as a tool for tracking the virus. The only thing it currently does is occupy space in the memory of your mobile.
ABC already reported a few months ago that the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence (Sedia), the institution in charge of the application, had no plans to renew the agreement with Indra for the maintenance of the tool. At first, it seemed that it would continue to be operational until November, at which time, in principle, the deal reached in 2020 with the Spanish technology company expired.
In its just over two years of life, Radar Covid has served to notify 124,555 positives for coronavirus, barely 1% of the total registered in Spain since the summer of 2020, at which time the application began to be operational. This has not prevented all Spaniards to date from investing more than 4.2 million euros in development, advertising and maintenance. In other words, for each code that has been inserted into the tool, the State has paid approximately 35 euros.
Last June, the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (AEPD) shared a resolution in which it was notified that Sedia violated eight articles of the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) during the development and launch of the tracking ‘app’, for which she was warned, but she was not fined with any economic amount as she was part of the Administration. According to the AEPD, the Secretary of State did not treat the information of the Spaniards with “lawfulness, loyalty and transparency”as required by the regulations.