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Tracing application: flip-flops from Berlin, which won Google and Apple approval

2020-04-26T12:29:23.225Z



The German government decided on Sunday to finally support a coronavirus carrier tracking application using technology developed by Google and Apple, abandoning a national solution criticized for its lack of protection of privacy.

Read also: StopCovid: the CNIL says yes under conditions to the tracking application

German health minister Jens Spahn and Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff Helge Braun say Berlin now favors a " decentralized architecture " that would allow users to store user data on their own phone rather than a database central data. " Our goal is to have the tracking app ready for use very soon and to be widely accepted by the public ," said Spahn and Braun in a joint statement.

Like Germany or France, several European countries which seek to protect themselves from a relaunch of the epidemic during deconfinement, are studying this type of device, which is based on " Bluetooth " technology allowing smartphones to communicate with each other.

Fears for personal data

Berlin has so far set its sights on a pan-European application known as PEPP-PT, developed by some 130 European scientists, including experts from the German research institute Fraunhofer and the public health body of the Robert Koch Institute. But there was strong opposition to the application, as it was planned to store the data on a central server, raising concerns that governments would collect this personal data and use it for surveillance.

In an open letter published earlier this week, some 300 academics urged governments to reject this centralized approach in favor of that of Apple and Google. Their operating system, which powers most smartphones around the world, is more privacy-friendly, they argued. The European Commission has also recommended that the data collected by these tracking applications should only be stored on users' phones and be encrypted.

The German government has repeatedly stressed that the use of any tracking application would be voluntary and the user anonymous, in a country still haunted by the practices of surveillance and denunciation of citizens at work under the totalitarian Nazi regime and then Communist.

Source: lefigaro

All business articles on 2020-04-26

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