The European Union now has detailed technical specifications to provide a framework for cross-border interoperability of mobile tracing applications based on a decentralised approach. The Commission reported on Tuesday 16 June that the Member States, meeting in the eHealth network, had reached agreement on this issue at their meeting last week.
As governments phase out containment measures, they rely on these tracking applications to alert users who may have been in the vicinity of a person who has reported testing positive for Covid-19 for a period of time. The new technical specifications will make it possible to exchange information also for users travelling to other Member States without the need to download several national applications.
Overview of Europe
The Commission's announcement came on the same day that the German authorities launched their national application, bringing the number of applications for tracing cases of coronavirus infection currently in circulation in the EU-27 to eight: Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Poland and now Germany have launched an application based on a decentralised model. Hungary and France are proposing an application based on a centralised approach.
Estonia, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Malta, Cyprus, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Denmark have already indicated that they also intend to propose a decentralised application in the future.
It should be noted that Slovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Slovenia are considering (or already have) the use of digital technologies, but exclude contact tracing.
Only for the decentralised approach
The guidelines only apply to applications that are based on a decentralised architecture. This means that arbitrary user IDs that have been detected in close proximity over a period of time remain on the phone itself and will be examined by the phone against the IDs of users who have been declared infected.
In other words, the German (decentralised) and French (centralised) applications, for example, cannot yet communicate with each other. The subject is being studied in another working group, says the European Commission, which does not commit to a timetable.
In its press release, the Commission announces the creation of an interface, a kind of gateway service, to efficiently receive and transmit relevant information from national contact tracing applications and servers. This is to minimise the volume of data exchanged and thus reduce user data consumption.
The service will first be launched as a pilot project in the coming weeks, with the participation of Germany, Ireland, Poland and the Netherlands, a Commission spokesman said.
More info at: https://bit.ly/3hvy83L (Sophie Petitjean)