COVID-10 Contact Tracing Apple and Google Must Comply with EU Privacy Laws Using Advanced Cryptography
The European Union wants Apple and Google to remove contact tracing apps that violate users’ privacy from their respective app stores as detailed in a report from 9-5 Mac. The Apps, which are not compulsory, are due to come out on April 28. However, the Legislators in Brussels have already published detailed guidance for the Member States on how to best use cryptography when building contract-tracing applications to help battle the current COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and it’s not clear if Google and Apple are totally compliant yet.
"But somecountries in the EU are calling for Apple and Google to bypass new privacy legislation to make it more effective. France’s digital minister, Cédric O, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “We’re asking Apple to lift the technical hurdle to allow us to develop a sovereign European health solution that will be tied our health system,” O said. Germany is at odds with the project as they have their own app technology in place based on the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) consortium and an app built by one of its members, the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute. Reuters is now reporting that Apple is refusing the EU apps to monitor Bluetooth while running in the background. “The chancellery is in talks with Apple but so far no solution is in sight,” opposition lawmaker Anke Domscheit-Berg said after parliament’s digital affairs committee was briefed by a government representative on Wednesday. Apple and Google are using Bluetooth low energy to reduce the tackle the spread of the virus by building a new layer into their existing operating systems. It’s an opt-in system that will appear on iPhones running iOS 13 and Android handsets running Android 6.0 and above from mid-May, which will use Bluetooth low energy to work out when two phones (and therefore phone owners) are in close proximity to each other.