I may be misunderstanding this thread, but what the parent is saying is that the BLE permission in Android was _never_ meant for privacy focused contact tracing

I may be misunderstanding this thread, but what the parent is saying is that the BLE permission in Android was _never_ meant for privacy focused contact tracing, and you are saying this is not a secret. This is why Google and Apple developed the Exposure API, which is more private because it doesn't save as many metadata than the classical BLE permission, and at least Google does _not_ allow apps to declare both the Exposed API and the location permission at the same time. This gives more guarantee to the users than just trusting the app developers. In other words, any serious privacy-focused contact tracing apps should use the Google/Apple Exposure API, and not a custom made solution on tops of the older BLE permissions. However, I still think digital contact tracing, even private, is a bad idea.