BY EARLY APRIL, as covid-19 spread around the world and lockdown gripped Europe, many of its governments had started building contact-tracing apps. They hoped to use smartphones to track people's contact with each other, and to pinpoint who might have been infected. Apple and Google tried to help. They started working together to rewrite the Bluetooth protocols in their phones so that apps could gather contact data in the background, from both iPhones and Android devices, without interfering with the normal operation of the phone or running down its battery. Building apps with that degree of interoperability and energy efficiency is vital if they are to help with the pandemic. Doing so is between hard and impossible without the new protocol. But it came with a catch. The plan from Apple and Google stated that contact data would be collected and stored privately on users' own phones, decentralised in a way that makes it impossible to siphon it all into central government servers. Many European countries had already started building contact-tracing apps that collect data in a centralised manner. The Apple-Google update would do nothing for them. They were upset.
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