European Experts Ready Smartphone Technology to Help Stop Coronavirus(nytimes.com)

European Experts Ready Smartphone Technology to Help Stop Coronavirus

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/01/technology/01reuters-health-coronavirus-europe-tech.html

1 comments

https://www.pepp-pt.org/ and even their manifesto document do not go into the necessary specifics as to how this is planned to be privacy preserving, the manifesto talks about "local trust centers", the article talks about logging BTLE connections. This all seems like stuff we've been discussing in the corresponding HN threads for weeks with no real way to do it in a privacy preserving manner. Without details making these assumptions sounds pretty ridiculous honestly. A bunch of talk about partnering and certifications. If you want to build something to preserve privacy in these scenarios, do it in the open.

The other cooperation mentioned there is https://gesund-zusammen.de/en/ - love that their security contact down below is listed as "responsibledisclosure@domain" and they have a bunch of lawyers on the team. How about we rename that to coordinateddisclosure@ folks? And similar to the first initiative, they had time to put up a press package but no technical details on what they actually want to achieve.

And all that for techniques that have not been proven to be effective yet? Great.

Edit: According to one of their contributors it will be open sourced on GitHub once a stable version is reached. https://twitter.com/gannimo/status/1245630618462867457 Still not great but at least we'll get a look inside.