In an interview with AlgorithmWatch, Prof. Susan Landau discusses why we need to resist fear in the face of pandemic uncertainty and the normalization of health surveillance technologies — and why the time to have a broad democratic discussion about their future uses is now.

National apps whose backends are now linked through the gateway service are Germany’s Corona-Warn-App, the Republic of Ireland’s COVID tracker, and Italy’s Immuni app.

To exploit the full potential of contact tracing and warning apps to break the chain of coronavirus infections across borders and save lives, the Commission, at the invitation by EU Member States, has set up an EU-wide system to ensure interoperability – a so-called ‘gateway'. After a successful pilot phase, the system goes live today with the first wave of national apps now linked through this service: Germany's Corona-Warn-App, Ireland's COVID tracker, and Italy's immuni. Together, these apps have been downloaded by around 30 million people, which corresponds to two-thirds of all app downloads in the EU.

How to do backward contact tracing is now the question… The key is in the venue-based tracking, which offers quicker and easier returns

This paper describes results of a Covid-19 contact tracing app measurement study carried out on a standard design of European commuter tram. The measurements indicate that in the tram there is little correlation between Bluetooth received signal strength and distance between handsets. The paper applies the detection rules used by the Italian, Swiss and German apps to measurement data and also characterised the impact on performance of changes in the parameters used in these detection rules.