shelf life covid radarhas come to an end. The ‘app’ developed by the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence (Ready), who aspired in the hardest months to make a difference in the fight against the pandemic, not functional since last weekend.
Since last Sunday, before for those users who downloaded the latest update of the application, the ‘app’ has stopped allowing the sharing of positive codes by Covid; nor does it notify any Internet user that they have been exposed to the virus. Bearing this in mind, at this point, the platform it only takes up space on your mobile device: absolutely useless.
In the future, keeping the ‘app’ installed could get you in trouble in case a malicious third party finds security bugs inside to penetrate your mobile device. And it is that, if the application is no longer useful for anything, it will not have supervision of any kind from next November, when the contract closed in the fall of 2020 between the Government and Indra for its maintenance ends.
The Radar COVID application has ended its activity today after a long history managing positive contacts in #covid in Spain. Thank you very much to all the users who have trusted us #RadarCovid pic.twitter.com/sRRteeGtBh
— RadarCOVID (@AppRadarCovid) October 9, 2022
Josep Albors, head of research and awareness of the cybersecurity company ESET points out in a conversation with ABC that, indeed, “the risk of a security hole being found in the application exists”, therefore, recommends all users to uninstall it as soon as possible.
The expert also points out that trying to limit the number of applications that we have installed on the terminal is a basic security measure: it makes no sense to maintain a platform that we do not use, since we cannot know for sure if malicious third parties know of any hole through which to steal personal information from the Internet user. In the case of Radar Covid the danger may be even greatersince, in principle, soon there will be no one waiting for the maintenance of the tool.
an absolute failure
During its lifetime, Radar Covid has failed miserably in its attempt to make a difference -even a minimal one- in the fight against the pandemic. After a promising pilot test on the island of La Gomera in the early summer of 2020, it did not take long for the tool to break down due to the little interest aroused in the user and the low participation by the different autonomies, in charge of giving Internet users with Covid the necessary codes to report positives.
In two years, the ‘app’ has been downloaded 8.6 million times -which does not imply that it has been used by 8.6 million people-. During that time it has been used for 124,555 codes. That is, just 1% of the total Covid cases registered in the country since the summer of 2020.
Bearing in mind that the State paid close to 4.2 million euros in terms of development, publicity and maintenance, the Spanish It has cost them about 30 euros each of the codes entered.