Security News > 2020 > April > Coronavirus tracking tool from Apple and Google embraced by Germany
Germany on Sunday pulled an about-face regarding the best way to use smart phones to trace people's contacts with those infected by COVID-19, embracing a decentralized Bluetooth-based approach instead of the more invasive location tracking proposed in other approaches.
Apple and Google first announced their contact tracing collaboration two weeks ago, on 10 April.
On Friday, Apple and Google said in a press briefing that besides relying on Bluetooth instead of location data, and on top of regularly changing the identifying IDs, they've also added a new layer of encryption for the tracing data.
As Reuters tells it, as late as Friday, Germany was backing a different approach to contact tracing called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing.
Apple and Google plan to collaborate with other initiatives, like the Swiss-led DP-3T, that similarly use a decentralized system that stores data on individual devices instead of in a centralized database.