BERLIN, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Germany's official app to counteract the spread of the coronavirus would be developed by telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom and software company SAP, the German federal government announced on Tuesday.
The "Corona-App" was intended to inform citizens who had been in contact with a person infected with COVID-19 "as quickly as possible," said the government, stressing that the app would enable prompt isolation of infected and thereby interrupt chains of infection.
According to the German federal government, the mobile app would be based on a "decentralized software architecture" which stored data on the mobile phones of users and could only be evaluated there, but not centrally on a server.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn had initially advocated centralized storage of data which was criticized because of concerns over data protection. Last weekend, the German government had finally decided on a decentralized solution.
In developing the tracing app, the German government had taken an approach that is "based on voluntariness, complies with data protection regulations and ensures a high level of IT security," Spahn and Helge Braun, head of the Chancellery, announced on Sunday.
The official app would use Bluetooth to measure distances between people and enable mobile devices to remember their contacts, according to the German government. If users test positive for COVID-19, they could choose to alert other users on a voluntary basis.
Because IDs were encrypted, app users would not know to whom their data was sent and only be informed that they had been in contact with an infected person without revealing individual identities, the government noted.
Once the app was fully developed by Deutsche Telekom and SAP, it would be launched by the Robert Koch Institute, the federal government agency for disease control and prevention. Enditem
