COVID-19: The critical role of authorities

Yesterday, we praised Apple and Google initiative to allow Bluetooth-based contact tracing. Without this joint effort, Bluetooth-based tracing would not be very efficient. The presented design is the only one that is expected to be functional across platforms and is likely to be adopted by all COVID-19 application developers.

It is a design very similar to DP3T's proposition. Phones are continuously advertising their presence using rolling proximity identifiers. Contact data is stored locally on the user's mobile. When reporting as infected, a user discloses all its pseudonymised identifiers to a remote server, presumably managed by a local health authority, or a government.

Apps regularly download the list of infected people identifiers and compute the user's infection risk based on the local list of encountered proximity identifiers.

We can help increase the impact by bridging authorities' data internationally, in the case of an infected user crossing a border. With the consent of the user, we can forward pseudonymised identifiers to all relevant authorities.

The secure automation of the infection confirmation, our second proposition, remains a high priority.