Germany backs Google and Apple's covid app, ditches alternative over privacy concerns
27 April, 2020
The German government on Sunday switched to backing a coronavirus-tracing iphone app using technology supported by Google and Apple, ditching a German-led alternative that had come under fire over privacy concerns.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief of staff Helge Braun said Berlin was now in favour of a “decentralised software architecture” that could see user data stored on people’s own phones instead of on a central database.
“Our goal is for the tracing application to be equipped for use soon and with strong acceptance from the general public and civil society,” Spahn and Braun said in a joint statement.
The rollout of an app that could use bluetooth to alert smartphone users if they have been in connection with someone infected with the virus is known as crucial in the fight the pandemic as countries like Germany relax their lockdowns.
Berlin has as yet thrown its weight behind a pan-European application referred to as PEPP-PT being developed by some 130 European scientists, including specialists from Germany’s Fraunhofer research institute and Robert Koch Institute public health body.
But the proposed app had faced growing criticism over its intend to store data on a central server.
Critics said it would allow governments to hoover up personal information and could lead to mass state surveillance.
In an open letter earlier this week, some 300 leading academics urged governments to dismiss the centralised approach, saying it risked undermining public trust.
They said an approach being produced by Apple and Google, whose os's run almost all of the world’s smartphones, was more privacy friendly.
The tech giants intend to collaborate with apps, just like the Swiss-led DP-3T, that use a decentralised system, which would see data placed on individual devices.
The European Commission in addition has recommended that data harvested through coronavirus contact-tracing software should be placed only on users’ own phones and become encrypted.
The German government has repeatedly stressed that the utilization of any coronavirus app will be voluntary and anonymous, in a country still haunted by the spying of the Nazi era and the former East German secret police.
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