Global Best Practices

Best practices for Apps depend highly on the Features that the App implements, and the available Implementation Choices for such features.

For example, with respect to privacy, an App that implements Contact Tracing does not need to know Personally Identifiable Information such as the App User’s medical record number; while an App that implements Home Monitoring cannot be effective without the very same medical record number. So it would not be useful to establish a single baseline for global best practices without taking the specific features into account that an App implements.

To compare the choices made by the App Creators for a given App to world-wide best practices as we have found them today:

  • start with the assay for one of the App on this site;
  • follow the links to the description of the features and implementation choices made by this App; and
  • from there, you can investigate other implementation choices that the App Creators could have made, including those that currently constitute world-wide best practices on this subject.

Example

For example, the German contact tracing app Corona-Warn-App shows it implements these main features:

and makes these key implementation choices:

Selecting one implementation choices, for example, “User is anonymous”, leads to a description of this choice, in relationship to other choices that the App Creators could have made instead:

These are documented with various pro’s and con’s, e.g. with respect to privacy or effectiveness.