SwissCovid in the Perspective of Its Goals

Abstract

SwissCovid is the Swiss digital contact tracing app, which was deployed to help fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. After a year of activity, it is high time to evaluate how effective it has been in its mission. At the highest peak, about 22% of the Swiss population was actively using SwissCovid. The activity of SwissCovid follows the curve on the number of COVID-19 cases. However, performances are rather poor. About 1% of the cases may have been discovered by SwissCovid and much less than 2% of SwissCovid alerts may have been useful, while SwissCovid generates 5% of the quarantines. The measure of the proximity of each encounter and its duration are also imprecise. It further comes with security and privacy issues: adversaries can inject false alerts for SwissCovid users and users can be tracked. On top of that, SwissCovid contributes to strengthen the monopoly of Apple and Google and to make users and their data captive of these giants. On top of that, SwissCovid contributes to strengthen the monopoly of Apple and Google. It also digs the digital divide. Contrarily to the original plan, the implementation is not open source and the law was twisted to fit the constraints by Apple and Google. Therefore, SwissCovid did not meet its goals.

Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization

“…“Arguments against centralized systems have been overly exaggerated, and the ones in favor of decentralized systems have been oversold to a level that we found unethical … In the former case, trust is based on a democratic system. In the latter case, trust is based on a commercial system.” Without the benefits of epidemiological data for Swiss health authorities, Vaudenay and Vuagnoux (2022) questioned “whether SwissCovid is useful at all.” They asked if it should be “shut down,” and concluded, “Citizens have no longer anything to say about it except taking it as a whole or refusing it. This is a major loss of government’s digital sovereignty” (sec.…”

Another Look at Privacy-Preserving Automated Contact Tracing

“…The security and privacy issues associated with existing ACT solutions have already been discussed in many places, e.g. [18,19,28,29]. Particularly, Vaudenay and Vuagnoux [29] performed a thorough analysis against the Swiss solution SwissCovid and identified a large number of issues w.r.t.…”

“…[18,19,28,29]. Particularly, Vaudenay and Vuagnoux [29] performed a thorough analysis against the Swiss solution SwissCovid and identified a large number of issues w.r.t. security and privacy.…”

“…As shown by Vaudenay and Vuagnoux in analysing the SwissCovid solution [29], an ACT solution may involve a large number of players. Besides users, health authority and medical personnel, app developers, device manufacturers, operating system providers, cloud storage service providers and regulators are also involved and have their respective impacts on security and privacy.…”

“…This should be regarded as an unnecessary privacy leakage from Bob's perspective. We note that although an official solution might not allow a user to keep the ephemeral identifier [29], Alice can still does it with a homemade app as the ACT protocol is often detailed in public [9].…”