England’s new vaccine passport has what it means for the next hidden technology action

Luca Ferrari’s contact tracking app for Italy, Immuni, was heavily involved as its developer’s CEO, Bending Spoons (the company is no longer involved in running the system). Launched in June 2020, Immuni was a 30,000-hour workforce dedicated to what Ferrari says, but it was difficult to navigate the connections between technology and public power.

“It simply came to our notice then [at the government] it was really determined to help people, “he says.” But the small imbalance of priorities and goals created big headaches and slowdowns. ”

For example, says Immuni, users who tested positive for Covid were asked to contact local public health officials. But these departments were too long to handle requests properly, so the app wasn’t used as much as initially expected.

He also said that the government let loose information about the reliability of the application flourish, and that it waited too long to deal with it.

However, he says the next wave of pandemic technology could learn from those lessons, and future public health emergencies could also benefit: “I would encourage authorities to try to stop the pandemic with a tool that we can bring out again.”

Globally, Parker and his team at the Ada Lovelace Institute have closely monitored how digital vaccine credentials are disseminated. They released 110 pages last week report of recommendations [pdf]. Although it’s too early to gauge how the NHS app will work, “they’re going pretty slow,” he said, “I think that’s good.”