One of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic consists of identifying
contacts of infected people so they can be informed about the risk; that will allow them
to search for medical care, if needed. This is laborious work if it is done
manually, so a number of applications have been developed to help with
contact tracing. But they are causing debates about their effectiveness and
privacy impacts. Many of the applications were released under open-source
licenses. Here, we look at the
principles of these applications and the software frameworks used to build them;
part two will look into some applications in more detail,
along with the controversies (especially related to privacy) around these tools.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Open-source contact tracing, part 1