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According to reports, Germany’s contact tracking app is almost ready.
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Across Europe, governments are planning the next phase of their response to the coronavirus pandemic. Common to its various strategies is asking its citizens to download an application to allow easier contact tracking.
Contact tracking, which usually involves a healthcare worker interviewing an infected patient to track who they’ve been in contact with, gets a shot in the arm as governments and companies around the world release versions of apps. mobiles.
The app sat on the phone, constantly ran in the background, and wrote down the phone of anyone else it came into contact with. People with the app who test positive for COVID-19 will upload the anonymous list of people they’ve found, and those people will receive an alert telling them to isolate themselves.
Contact tracking apps are currently under development across the continent, and Germany announced on Friday that it will launch its software in the coming weeks. France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Italy are also working on their own apps, which are likely to be implemented as blocking restrictions are lifted.
It is part of a broader effort worldwide. Countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand have previously released their own apps, though their efforts likely won’t meet EU privacy standards (South Korea, in particular, combined GPS tracking with credit card transactions. and facial recognition). Meanwhile, in the USA. The US, Google and Apple are leading the effort to create a framework that enables contact tracking apps to work on iOS and Android.
Each country has chosen to create a custom app to meet their own requirements, though across the EU, countries like Italy and Germany are using a platform known as the Pan-European Privacy Preservation Proximity Trace (PEPP-PT) as a common base . The EU also released guidelines Thursday that stipulate how apps must comply with EU-wide privacy standards, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Electronic Privacy Directive.
Privacy is central to the discussion of contact tracking applications. Although they are seen as a key tool to control the future spread of the coronavirus, they are also open to misuse and present a possible “slip factor” for people who are uncomfortable with the idea of the government or a company tracking their location. .
Contact tracking applications can rely on technologies including GPS or Bluetooth, with Bluetooth being the preferred choice by most European countries. Another key attribute of maintaining privacy will be ensuring that carefully anonymized data is stored locally on people’s devices rather than in a central repository.
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“This is the first global crisis in which we can unleash the full power of technology to offer efficient solutions and support exit strategies from the pandemic,” EU Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová said in a statement. . “The confidence of Europeans will be key to the success of mobile tracking applications.”
Looking at Germany
Within Europe, all eyes will be on Germany. German Health Minister Jens Spahn said on Friday that the country’s app will launch in three to four weeks, and that Reuters reported it is ready and being tested by the time the closure restrictions are lifted. (The German Federal Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment.) The country will be an important test bed for the adoption of contact tracking applications due to its cultural and legal acceptance of privacy.
A common observation about the country is that, after two authoritarian regimes, in which state surveillance of the general population played a key role, German citizens suspect anything resembling an invasion of their privacy. . Cultural attitudes are backed by strict privacy legislation, which is among the strictest in Europe and the world.
Germany also provides an interesting case study because thanks to extensive monitoring and manual contact testing, it has managed to keep its death rate much lower than that of most other nations. As of Friday, Germany had reported 3,868 deaths from the virus, compared to 28,221 in the US. USA And 13,729 in the United Kingdom, despite having the fifth highest number of confirmed cases worldwide. The country’s response to the virus is being studied in real time and is lauded by many around the world (although closer to home it is also exposing cracks in the federal system).
But of particular interest to many viewers, including other European governments, will be whether Germany can encourage adoption of its app. For a contact tracking app to be effective, the majority of the population (researchers’ estimates range from 50% to 80%) will need to choose to use it. In Singapore, only one in six people downloaded their TraceTogether contract tracking app, Singapore’s national development minister Lawrence Wong said on April 1.
A strong government campaign with the support of the media and ideally little or no opposition from privacy advocates will be necessary to build widespread confidence in the technology. Most tech companies and governments agree that forcing people to download the app would do the opposite of instilling confidence.
Privacy is not even the only problem that governments will have to tackle when it comes to instilling trust. As with other coronavirus measures, such as social distancing, they should assure people that the applications will have the desired effect so that people think that it is worth choosing to participate (and some of the tests have been unstable).
“We really need this app and we must persuade as many people as possible to use it,” said Christian Drosten, who is director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité hospital in Berlin and host of a successful podcast informing the German public about the coronavirus. in an interview with the Financial Times.
For Germany, which appears to be at a fairly advanced stage of developing its application, and which must also persuade a privacy-conscious population to download the software, the challenge will need to be addressed soon. If Germany can succeed, the country will provide a model that others are likely to follow.
