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Telekom boss Tim Höttges at a presentation of the German warning app in June 2020
Photo: CLEMENS BILAN / POOL / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
The Corona warning app is being expanded to include an important function: from October, warnings about risk contacts are to be exchanged from app users from a total of eleven European countries via a new Europe-wide system.
To this end, Deutsche Telekom and SAP are developing a so-called European gateway through which the countries' apps are interconnected.
This was announced by the heads of the two companies at a press conference on Wednesday.
Until now, German users had to install the apps of the respective travel countries in order to be able to exchange contact information with local people.
This will no longer be necessary with the European solution.
The German warning app is connected to the European system by Telekom and SAP and can communicate with the warning apps in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
These countries could be part of the system because their warning apps work according to a decentralized procedure, i.e. the comparison of contacts takes place on the mobile phone.
France cannot be connected to the system because the app there handles corona contact tracking via a central process, i.e. the processing of the data is handled on central servers.
In France, the number of infections has increased particularly sharply in recent weeks.
The reports on risk encounters are exchanged via servers of the European Commission in Luxembourg, as Telekom boss Tim Höttges said.
Corona contacts are recorded and exchanged using the same data protection-friendly, decentralized procedure as with the German Corona warning app.
The transmission of a risk contact is also voluntary here and no personal data is exchanged, only pseudonymized identification numbers.
(In this video, we explain in detail how the risk determination of the Corona warning app works.)
Switzerland's EU problem
For the time being, Switzerland will not be connected to the European system.
Although the country has an app that works according to a decentralized procedure, it is not part of the European Union.
Chancellery chief Helge Braun (CDU) said on Wednesday that he was in an exchange with the European Commission about an agreement so that the non-EU country Switzerland can also be connected to the European app system.
In the direction of Commission President von der Leyen, he said: "In the crisis you have to act and not negotiate."
Telekom and SAP did not announce the exact start time of the new system on Wednesday.
But it will "be rolled out by October," said Höttges.
On Wednesday they did not want to say whether the system would actually be available for users until the autumn holidays.
The European data exchange system was developed by the Ministry of Health, Telekom and SAP and was already promised when the Cornona warning app was launched three months ago.
From October, the German Corona warning app will be expanded to include a voluntary symptom query.
This should allow a better assessment of how critical a risk encounter was.
The queried symptoms would only be saved locally on the device and not shared, said SAP technical director Jürgen Müller on Wednesday.
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