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research article

SwissCovid in the Perspective of Its Goals

Vaudenay, Serge  
•
Vuagnoux, Martin  
February 7, 2022
Digital Threats: Research and Practice

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. 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.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/3480465
Author(s)
Vaudenay, Serge  
Vuagnoux, Martin  
Date Issued

2022-02-07

Published in
Digital Threats: Research and Practice
Volume

3

Issue

3

Start page

1

End page

17

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LASEC  
Available on Infoscience
November 20, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/192341
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