Spain has announced its participation with Apple and Google in a worldwide project to create an app to track the Coronavirus through Bluetooth

Spain has announced its participation with Apple and Google in a worldwide project to create an app to track the Coronavirus through Bluetooth

THE Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence in Spain announced on Monday its participation in a European project originated in Germany called PEPP (Pan-European Proximity Tracking to Preserve Privacy).
The project, broadly speaking, is as follows: when a person knows that they have been infected, they notify a mobile app that, through Bluetooth, contacts all the phones with which the person has had close contact, such as having maintained a distance of fewer than two metres for at least five to 10 minutes.
Apple and Google have already started working together in an unprecedented collaboration to facilitate this global protocol. The idea is that each country chooses an app, make it available to the technological giants, which in Spain dominate 99 per cent of the market, so that an update of the operating system installs it, in principle, always with the user’s permission.
This type of tracking is not, therefore, a magic solution nor is it clear that it works. But in recent weeks it has been increasingly seen as the only great technological alternative. If the two companies that control the majority of the world’s mobile phones introduce it, we will know that it will be used now to combat the pandemic. Apple and Google insist they will dismantle it once the pandemic passes. The idea opens all kinds of ethical and legal debates.
Eduardo Manchón, founder of Mailtrack and Panoramio and digital advisor, acknowledges that zero trace is impossible in technology, but ensures that there are solutions that would provide a lot of security and that the privacy of users does not have to be compromised. “When you put mobile phones to talk via Bluetooth, they can do so through codes in which the user is not even identified. And the information can stay on each device, it doesn’t even have to be stored on a server,” he explains.

Spain lags behind other countries, which have already announced their intention to implement these solutions. In Germany, politicians and scientists have been talking about such an app for weeks, as a key instrument in the post-isolation phase. The idea is that it be launched in the next few weeks, but in any case, it should be for voluntary use by citizens, in order to comply with data protection laws.