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To curb the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and allow people to return to their daily lives, Apple and Google have joined forces to anchor the infrastructure of so-called contact tracking applications in their mobile operating systems. With the help of the digital age, contact tracking apps are designed to assist health authorities in what they have always been doing to prevent the spread of communicable diseases: if a patient is diagnosed with a notifiable disease, Health authorities try to find out who the patient is with and when they had contact. These people are then warned that they may be infected and may be asked to be quarantined.
Apple, Google and DP3T
For contact tracking to run automatically on a larger scale, some technical sophistication is required, especially if you want to implement everything according to European data protection standards. Parts of this technology have been completely rebuilt in recent weeks. The method that Apple and Google are working on is largely in line with proposals from the Decentralized Proximity Tracking Protocol to Preserve Privacy (DP3T) project, which was developed by an independent group of European researchers and[whosecodesourcehasbeenthesubjectofananimaldiscussiononthedevelopmentplatformofGitHubforsometime[dessenBeispiel-QuellcodebereitsseiteinigerZeitaufderEntwicklungsplattformGitHubregediskutiertwird[cuyocódigofuentedemuestrahasidoobjetodeunaanimadadiscusiónsobrelaplataformadedesarrollodeGitHubdurantealgúntiempo[dessenBeispiel-QuellcodebereitsseiteinigerZeitaufderEntwicklungsplattformGitHubregediskutiertwird
Apple, Google and the international research community behind DP3T make this effort so that the governments of several states do not make it too easy for them and implement the simplest form of contact tracking: the user’s smartphone records all their movements through GPS and transmits them to a central server under state control. An absolute horror scene to be avoided at all costs. After all, once a state has this kind of control over its citizens, it is unlikely that it will be returned voluntarily. Historians in this perpetuation of emergency laws recognize a recurring problem of modern state structures.
Below we describe the proposal of Apple and Google for the implementation of a contact tracking system, which due to the market dominance of Android and iOS devices, has the greatest possibility of asserting itself throughout Europe. However, these are not applications, but rather an API of the respective operating system, which in turn can be used by applications from health authorities in different countries. A German Corona app could build later on this infrastructure, for example.
In late 2019, a new disease began to develop in China, COVID-19 lung disease triggered by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Quarantine measures to contain the virus lead to production downtime and increasingly severe consequences for the economy and daily life.
The objective is to develop a system that can warn possible contacts of infected people so that they can be quarantined and cut the virus infection chain. This is to prevent future infections. However, this must be accomplished without the participants in this system being able to identify each other. Above all, no one should be able to draw conclusions about who is infected. And it should be avoided that any party, especially the state, can use the tracking data to reconstruct a social graph of the movements of the participants in the system.
