Non-Governmental and Data-Protected: Austria's Corona App as a Good

The Corona app should also come in Germany to reliably track infection chains and to promptly quarantine people if necessary. But the federal government is struggling to get the project going. The confidence of the German population in the planned tracing program is rather low, the data protection concerns are great. In Austria, however, the project is already running successfully.

The contact tracking app is open source

Austria's Corona app has been in action since March, it comes from the Red Cross (WCC) and is considered to be privacy-friendly. The view over to our southern neighbors could be inspiring. Here with us, Deutsche Telekom and SAP have been commissioned to develop a contact tracking app, but it will take weeks to get the first result. The Austrian government, however, was planning a digital solution very early on, but the level of discomfort among the population was similar to that in Germany. In this situation, the WCC came forward, an organization with a high level of trust. The Red Cross contacted the developers of "Accenture", but also brought data protectionists and civil rights activists to the project. After a short time there was a finished software, open source,

A token is used for data anonymization

The distance is measured not only via Bluetooth, but also via an ultrasound signal via the cell phone speaker. This enables the distances to other devices to be determined much more precisely. At the moment, servers are still connected when the contact messages are exchanged; the switch to direct communication between smartphones is in progress. Now, when entering a positive result, a token should also serve as a means of communication in order to completely anonymize the smartphone owner. This will abolish the previous TAN procedure.

Austria's app is therefore non-governmental and grants maximum data protection with the upcoming improvements. So far, the program is still running in the foreground, but with the new API for Android and iOS, the Corona app is only activated to send the key. This saves a lot of energy. Perhaps the WCC and the DRC, possibly with the involvement of the international committee, should sit down and discuss the further spread of the clever program.