Jan Kleijssen, Director of the Information Society and Action against Crime Directorate at the Council of Europe, expressed doubts on 5 June about the use of tracing applications to combat Covid-19.
At least 40 countries around the world have implemented such applications, including several EU Member States.
“The apps must respect transparency, voluntary download, privacy, be for specific purposes, anonymisation of data, persons must not be identified, and they must have an architecture that is as decentralised as possible with interoperability of systems”, he stated at a hearing in the European Parliament’s Sub-Committee on Human Rights.
He was disappointed that many of the applications had been developed in haste and that there was a lack of cooperation between States, even European ones. “When it comes to a tracing application, cross-border interoperability is important”, he insisted.
According to Kleijssen, the effectiveness of the apps so far has been mixed, and enthusiasm and even confidence in them is low. “In Austria, less than 6% of the population have decided to download the application. In Singapore – the first country to have had such an application – the rate is 20%. While the acceptance rate is reportedly quite high in Australia, it appears that only one case has been identified through the application”, he specified. The representative of the Council of Europe added that in France, a country with 67 million inhabitants, 17 million of them did not own a smartphone.
Mr Kleijssen also emphasised that even though the downloading of the app was voluntary, people were not free from pressure or discrimination.
In the opinion of South Korea's Soh Changrok, a member of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, “the pandemic involves making a choice between privacy and health. Health is a priority, but the need to protect privacy must not be ignored”. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)