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The Federal Office of Public Health will issue an application to further curb the spread of the coronavirus and to break and track the chains of infection. The most important things at a glance.
The federal contact tracking app will be available to everyone in June.
In the conventional contact trace, carried out by cantonal authorities, people infected with Sars-CoV-2 are interviewed by phone, and therefore contacts are reconstructed. The federal government also plans to introduce a contact tracking application. The Swiss PT app (PT is short for proximity tracking) is logged when the smartphones that have installed the app have been approached for a long time, and there has been a risk of infection.
No The application must be voluntary. Furthermore, according to the Federal Office of Public Health (BAG), the system should be closed as soon as the crown crisis ends.
The prerequisite is that the federal app is installed on the smartphone and that Bluetooth is activated. If the smartphone is less than two meters away for a total of more than 15 minutes during a day from another smartphone on which the application is also installed, this contact is saved anonymously on both devices. According to the BAG, the 15-minute set and a distance of about two meters are adjusted with increasing experience to make the most accurate statement possible about the probability of infection. If a person becomes infected, they receive a so-called Covid code from the cantonal medical service, which uses the application to notify all those who have recently been in critical contact with the infected. Notified persons can contact the hotline specified in the application.
After installing and configuring the app, the smartphone owner does not have to do anything else except to make sure that Bluetooth stays on.
The application uses the so-called decentralized approach to data storage. Many data protection experts describe this as very secure. With its protocol called DP-3T, the Swiss have developed a solution that is now being adopted by other countries.
This is how encryption works
When the application is downloaded, it does not communicate with a central server.
Smartphones send encrypted IDs at regular intervals via Bluetooth. Other smartphones that have the same or compatible tracking application installed listen to these messages at the same time and save all the identifications they might receive. The prerequisite is that they have approached more than two meters for 15 minutes in a day. In the decentralized model, the server is only used to exchange the keys of infected people in the event of an infection.
That happens with a notification
Only keys are exchanged. The contact lists remain local on the respective devices.
Information about which devices have found which other devices remains on the smartphones themselves. After three weeks, the contacts will be removed from the list. It is also not possible to save location data, as only Bluetooth measures how close two smartphones have come close. Where this meeting took place is not understandable.
BAG will test the app with a limited group of users in May. The Federal Council plans to issue a temporary regulation for this pilot phase on May 13. Parliament had also given the government a mandate this week to provide a legal basis for the application. The government wants to present a message before May 20. Subsequently, the responsible committees should lean on it at a rapid pace, because the summer session of Parliament begins in early June, in which the bill will be finalized. So the app should be available to everyone across the country.
The application was developed by ETH Lausanne and ETH Zurich, as well as by the Swiss company Ubique.
For the time being, this will only be the case to a very limited degree, as such an application is still being developed in many countries. Also, these official tracking apps must use the same decentralized approach as the Swiss app, otherwise they could not communicate with each other.
Google and Apple announced shortly before Easter that they would support official contact tracking apps. In May, Bluetooth interfaces will be released, which should allow smartphones to communicate with each other, regardless of whether they run on Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS operating system. The two American tech giants have also come up with guidelines that official tracking apps must adhere to, and are similar to those of the Swiss app. As a general rule, a country can only register an official request. This must be published by the health authority and used only to track the coronavirus. The app shouldn’t use location data like GPS, and should rely on the decentralized approach to data storage. In addition, the user must give his consent for the application to work and, in case of infection, if he informs the application. Google and Apple want to create a standard so that applications from different countries are also compatible with each other.
No Anonymous data remains locally on users’ smartphones, and the key is only sent from the infected person’s device to a server in case of infection. However, it does not belong to Google or Apple, but is provided by an authority. In the Swiss case, the Federal Statistical Office will be the Datatrust Center and will operate the central infrastructure.
