Plus, what’s big tech doing to help? Not much it seems, Bill Gates excepted
By Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco
Comment With the rate of deaths from COVID-19 beginning to decline in Europe, the focus has turned to how to manage virus spread once lockdown orders are lifted. The proposed solutions say a lot about the planet’s cultures.
In Brussels, EU representatives are hoping to use the European sense of identity to pull together a coordinated plan across its 27 member states, particularly when it comes to reporting symptoms and tracking movement. Several nations have produced smartphone apps for their citizens to download and provide vital information on the situation on the ground but this is the EU and so, of course, the EU has decided that there should be only one app that everyone is obliged to use.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Wojciech Wiewiórowski has recorded a video explaining his logic.
“The EDPS is aware that a number of EU Member States have or are in the process of developing mobile applications that use different approaches to protect public health, involving the processing of personal data in different ways,” he said.
“The use of temporary broadcast identifiers and Bluetooth technology for contact tracing seems to be a useful path to achieve privacy and personal data protection effectively. Given these divergences, the European Data Protection Supervisor calls for a panEuropean model ‘COVID-19 mobile application’, coordinated at EU level.” (PDF transcript here).
It’s a typically bureaucratic response – everything must go through a single point, us – and it appears to have been issued in ignorance of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project, which has overnight posted its planned scheme on GitHub.
The EU could come up with a data framework and guidelines for sharing that data openly and encourage other organizations and nations to develop their own apps to add to the data pool. That would allow many more people to get involved, help the better apps bubble up to the top, and allow for those who understand cultural and society differences to better target all segments of society.
But no, this is the EU and everything must be done through centrally. We can confidently predict a terrible, clunky and confusing app that launches late and fails early. And does so long after smaller and poorer nations like India implement apps that accumulate over 20 million users in under a week.
On the plus side, thanks to GDPR and the lengthy privacy debate that Europe has gone through, even the bureaucracies understand the importance of how to deal with data and have a framework for gathering it and then getting rid of the files later, one would hope.
And in the land of the Free™
Meanwhile in the US, the federal government is currently pretending that it isn’t trying to do the exact same thing even as it become clear that is exactly what is planned.[…]
msamba 