German government releases its corona app this week

The government’s corona app will appear in Germany this week, German health minister Jens Spahn confirms. According to the German Data Protection Authority, the app makes a ‘solid impression’.

On which day the German government wants to present the corona app, Spahn did not yet announce to ARD, but the media in the country assumes Tuesday. The federal government originally wanted to release the app in mid-April, but after criticism over the storage method, the government had to revise its plans. Initially, the government had opted for central storage of contact details, but the Chaos Computer Club, among others, strongly criticized that plan, after which the app had to go back to the drawing board and opt for a decentralized architecture, in which the contacts only stored on users’ devices. to be.

The German corona contact tracing app sends out bursts of sixteen keys via Bluetooth every two and a half to five minutes. Based on its signal strength, smartphones estimate the distance to each other and this contact information is stored. Anyone who catches Covid-19 can indicate this in the app, after which it will send a warning to all contacts who have been nearby. The app also includes the option to save results of corona tests, after which healthcare can read them via a QR code. To avoid false alerts, users must enter a healthcare verification code when reporting they are infected.

The Corona Warn app was developed by Deutsche Telekom in collaboration with SAP, advised by the technical institute Fraunhofer and Cispa. The source code of the app is posted on Github. The app uses the Exposure Notification framework from Apple and Google.