Background limitation and impact?
LegFranck opened this issue · 5 comments
TraceTogether/Bluetrace highlight in their WP the major limitation of BLE not being able to run in the background on iPhones (when screen off) requiring users to keep their phone's screen on by all times (see excerpt below). It seems that the background restrictions have not been considered in your design since you focus on privacy. Nonetheless:
- Did you evaluate what is the impact of this limitation on contact discovery and hence contact tracing?
- How do you plan going around that other than having to use the Apple-Google framework?
I've highlighted this limitation in my post here: https://medium.com/@legfranck/the-good-and-the-bad-of-apple-googles-privacy-preserving-contact-tracing-744806450be9
Other issue on both iOS and Android is that system might kill app anytime if it needs to free some resources. When app is not running (not even in background), collecting bluetooth information is not possible.
The iOS issue with applications in background being unable to send/receive BLE traffic is a key practical issue. There are technics to mitigate it and this is what will be deployed in GB.
However this is not our goal in the ROBERT protocol design team to focus on this topic.
Why Alice would have her Covid application open? This application is not a social network app or an internet browser on which the user might spend some time reading content, watching pictures, videos.
This application will be almost NEVER in foreground state.
@Julien-Roger I don't get your comment. Whom are you answering to?