Peru's Covid-19 app still leaves more questions than answers

It's been two months since the launch of "Perú en us manos", the mobile app promoted by the Peruvian government amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Until now the app did not accomplish the ambitious goals it set out to.

On its first month the app had detected 1400 risk zones while there where already 36,000 confirmed infection cases. There is little transparency on how those risk zones are estimated. Developers of the app state that only one fifth of the data provided by the Health Ministry is clean enough to be fed to the app.

The data collected is stored and proccessed in Google and Amazon servers. The App does not do live geotracking but still has permissions to access GPS and Bluetooth on your device. Still, nowhere in its Terms of Privacy does it state why the app needs those permitions.

The government refused to make the app open source, unlike India, Singapore and the UK for example. The App is being developed by a council of ministers in collaboration with a group of public and private entities. There have been talks about importing Korea's app as well as about using Google and Apple's API but so far there is no official statement on how exactly the app is operating.

Writter: Miguel Morachimo
Source: Hiperderecho