Europe rolling out contact tracing apps
ROME — When three people in the northern Italian region of Liguria tested positive for the coronavirus last week, they gave their doctors permission to punch into a national server anonymous codes generated by a new contact tracing application on their phones.
Moments later, the phones of people who had also voluntarily downloaded the app and had come into contact with them buzzed with an alert.
Italy expanded that pilot program Monday, to join the first European countries using national contact tracing apps. France has also activated its own app, Germany’s became available for downloading Tuesday, and Britain is testing one, too.
The launch of the apps comes as more European countries loosened restrictions and opened borders to each other this week, hoping to revive their societies and economies without reigniting the contagion.
But as they turn to unproven technology to avoid a second wave of infection, European nations are setting off widespread debate about how best to fight the virus while safeguarding privacy rights.
Italy’s new app is just the latest iteration of the existential challenges the virus has thrust upon Europe. Just months ago, Italy crossed a threshold when it became the first European country to mandate a strict nationwide lockdown, raising questions of whether it was running roughshod over individual rights, as well as threatening the European Union’s internal cohesion, in its effort to contain the virus.
Those concerns seemed to melt away quickly as more and more European countries saw the necessity for similar measures. Now the tracing apps present a host of new questions, not least whether they work effectively or better than human tracing.
Europeans also wonder whether the apps are placing nations on a slippery slope toward a new kind of surveillance state, or handing over too much power to foreign tech giants.
Also, there are the questions of how to reconcile national independence with Europe-wide interoperability. On Tuesday the European Union announced that its members had agreed to standards to allow their various apps to share data.
Such issues have not been limited to Europe and have been addressed variably around the globe.
In Asia, nations like South Korea have used cellphone data and credit card activity to successfully track and contain infections.
India has required its citizens to download an app. The United States has tended to rely on human tracers in efforts that remain patchy and limited.
Italy has tried to finesse some of the thornier privacy concerns by making its app — called Immuni, or Immune — voluntary. What’s more, the app is built on a platform developed in a rare collaboration between Apple and Google, which sided with privacy advocates who raised concerns about how much data governments could collect through the apps and limited Immuni’s data-transmission capabilities.
Those restrictions and the voluntary approach may reduce the app’s effectiveness but may also go some way toward assuaging public queasiness about state intrusion. Its creators hope that the app will be used widely enough to play an important part in protecting public health.
“It could be a tool with major impact,” said Paola Pisano, Italy’s minister for technological innovation. “It depends on how it will be used.”