A report published on Monday 12 October by the Council of Europe (CoE) assesses the extent to which digital solutions put in place to tackle Covid-19 comply with the personal data protection principles set out in ‘Convention 108’, which has been signed and ratified by the Council’s 47 member states.
The report, which can be found at https://bit.ly/3iSoGae , provides an overview of digital contact tracing apps and monitoring and control tools put in place in Europe and in eight Latin American and African countries that are also signatories to the Convention. The report welcomes the fact that emergency measures taken by governments have generally been of limited duration, but “regrets that in spite of numerous calls for coordination and interoperability of digital solutions to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, countries have individually implemented widely diverging systems, thereby limiting the efficiency of the measures taken”.
The report also identifies gaps with regard to the requirement to provide a legal basis for the measures taken, the proportionality of the measures, the public interest justification for introducing them, and obtaining individuals’ consent to having their data processed. The risks to the security, storage and sharing of data are significant and have even led some countries to withdraw some measures, the report says.
Publishing source codes (which 20 of the countries participating in the survey launched by the CoE on 27 May have so far done) may improve app effectiveness and user confidence, the report says, before going on to call for civil society and the general public to be involved in developing digital solutions, where transparency will be vital. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)