ETSI gets to work on new contact tracing app standard

With countries across Europe all trying to reinvent the wheel with their own contact tracing apps, standardization is long overdue.

The responsibility for this has been taken by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which has created a special group dedicated to developing a ‘standardization framework for secure smartphone-based proximity tracing systems’. It’s called the Industry Specification Group “Europe for Privacy-Preserving Pandemic Protection,” which is mercifully abbreviated to ISG E4P.

“By their nature smartphones are highly personal devices, carrying large amounts of data about individuals,” said ETSI Director-General Luis Jorge Romero. “In ETSI we are committed to support an international development community with a robust standardization framework that allows rapid, accurate and reliable solutions while winning the trust of the population at large.”

Point well made about trust, Luis. The UK, for example, currently seems determined to give its National Health Service access to the data created by the national contact tracing app. Not only would this alienate Google and Apple, thus making the app a lot less effective, but it would almost certainly lead to far fewer people using it.

“A primary challenge is collecting, processing and acting on information about citizens’ proximity at scale, potentially representing tens or hundreds of millions of people,” says the ETSI announcement. “This must also be achieved without compromising users’ anonymity and privacy, and while safeguarding them against exposure to potential cyber-attacks.”

Again, Google and Apple seem to have this more or less covered, but there’s no way a mega-bureaucracy like the EU would ever concede the private sector might have the answer to a public problem. So ETSI will probably take weeks to come up with something very similar, at which point the EC will order all its members to use it regardless of any progress they’ve made independently.

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