Radar COVID, a mobile application created by the Ministry of Health to “fight” the coronavirus epidemic, has ceased operations and its functionalities have stopped working, as we read on the official website. If you have used it before, you should uninstall it immediately.

The COVID radar was on paper a technological means of relief in the midst of a pandemic. It allowed you to receive notifications if you have been in contact with someone who has been diagnosed as positive for COVID-19 in so-called “automated tracing”, which is necessary to stop chains of infection. If we all used it and it worked properly, it’s understandable.

But users didn’t find it useful enough and there were relatively few downloads and less use. The practical result was that the COVID Radar barely helped record 1% of confirmed infections. Plus it was late, his breakdowns were constant and as if that wasn’t enough, violated up to eight articles of the GDPR, for which the Data Protection Agency even filed a lawsuit against the Spanish government. And he wasn’t the only executive questioned for breach of privacy.

The COVID radar: a total fiasco

Several countries have promoted COVID-19 tracking apps to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Globally, its use has been minimal, in Spain and the rest completely insufficient to achieve the objectives. Why wasn’t a simple technological measure used that could offer tangible benefits in the face of a pandemic through a medium as widespread as the smartphone?

The main reason: lack of privacy guarantees. One hundred international organizations have signed an open letter asking world governments for guarantees that digital technologies that have begun to be used to monitor and track people and populations to stop the coronavirus fully respect human rights, including digital rights.

And they didn’t come true. Anti-Covid tracking apps have been pilloried from the get-go. One or more of Australia’s security and intelligence agencies had August and “incidentally” collected data related to the COVIDSafe contact tracing app they were using there. It was even worse in Israel. The app was so controversial that the courts ordered it shut down.

In addition, there have been so many excesses in spying, collection and shameful handling of personal data, in most cases without authorization and without knowledge, that users are scaled and reluctant to use this type of applications, even in the face of potential benefits.

Summary: fiasco. In the event that a pandemic or a similar pandemic unfortunately returns, it would be advisable to prepare a digital environment that meets the proposed rights-respecting goals. This was not the case with the COVID Radar or similar ones in other countries. If you have the app installed, you need to uninstall it immediately, because apart from being useless, it can be used to introduce malware once the platform maintenance is no longer invested.