covid-alert-app VS documents

Which app are you talking about? If you're referring to the national COVID Alert app, it was open source. If you're referring to the system APIs that were provided by iOS and Play Services, then of course they were not open source, but they did have very, very thorough white papers, and they were not developed by the government.

Reddit is literally filled with developers and this is the most tech illiterate thread I’ve come across. The app is a public repo

It's open source, here's the hit repository: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app

If you're curious, the source code is here: App: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app Server: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-server

The basic setup is pretty solid for privacy. You can, if you're really paranoid, build the app from scratch because the source is right here. Doing it that way will get around any concerns they backdoor the prebuilt app with something nefarious.

It was developed by CDS. It’s open source too.

The apps themselves in Canada at least are open source (server) and have been peer reviewed by third parties and anybody in the community who was interested, a few things were fixed that way. I can not comment on other countries.

Please check out the DP-3T project, they came up a pretty good privacy-preserving solution for the COVID-19 contact tracking using only Bluetooth Low Energy.

GApple covid19 tracing api is based on the DP-3T tracing protocol, the (very human readable) whitepaper of which can be read here: https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/DP3T%20White%...

There was a lot of disinformation regarding contact tracing apps, both from tin-foil hat wearers, incompetent (or maybe corrupt?) state officials as well as competing, centralized (and actually privacy-breaching) solutions. I can still see a lot of this going around.

https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/issues/128#issuecomment-629781372

DP-3T (short for Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) is developed mainly by the EPFL in Switzerland and has also had great influence in the GAEN protocol. Apart from the one from its home country, the CTAs from Estonia, Malta, Portugal and Spain use this implementation too.