The Diplomatic Council has joined the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative PEPP-PT. Other members of this project to fight Covid-19 include arago, Fraunhofer, Vodafone and the Universities of Berlin, Dresden, Linz and Munich as well as the Robert Koch Institut.

We as all other members believe that the Covid-19 pandemic can be managed in a socially, economically, and humanly acceptable manner that does not lead to social or economic collapse, provided that nations:

1. swiftly identify potential infection chains by isolating singular infection cases and their exposed contacts,
2. so we can restart social and economic life,
3. and can manage health-system resources at maximum efficiency though individual risk
   assessment.

The way to achieving these goals is to use technology to track physical interactions among people; immediately isolate identified, infected cases; and quarantine their contacts. This way, everybody – hopefully in the short term – can return to near-normal social and economic life.

The scale of this endeavor is achievable through the intelligent use of digital technology. The natural starting point is mobile phones. Most people carry them, and those without them can be equipped swiftly and cheaply. Some Asian countries have already undertaken similar successful efforts that restarted their social life and economy quickly after a major epidemic outbreak—or have prevented major outbreaks altogether. However, privacy and data protection standards in Europe.

PEPP-PT was intentionally created to provide a solution to this challenge that adheres to strong European privacy and data protection laws and principles. The PEPP-PT technical mechanisms and standards will fully protect privacy while taking advantage of the possibilities of digital technology to maximize the speed and real-time capability of a national pandemic response. Our goal is to make this technology available to all countries, managers of infectious disease responses, and developers as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

PEPP-PT is an international initiative that provides technical standards, mechanisms, and services to create interoperable local solutions. Our mechanisms include well-tested proximity-tracing technologies, secure data anonymization, trustworthy mechanisms to enable contact between user and health-officials, and APIs that provide anonymized contact chains as well as risk-scoring. The reference implementation offers building blocks (under an open source license) to create local applications, as well as a secure and scalable backend service that can scale to hundreds of millions of registered devices.

PEPP-PT enables national initiatives to focus on integration into national processes, national law, local customs, and specific requirements. PEPP-PT will offer a certification service for these initiatives so national authorities can release applications with a high level of assurance that European standards in data protection, privacy, and security are enforced and that cross-border interoperability is supported.

The PEPP-PT mechanisms will have these core features:

1. Well-tested and established procedures for proximity measurement on popular mobile operating systems and devices.
2. Enforcement of data protection, anonymization, GDPR compliance, and security.
3. International interoperability to support tracing local infection chains even if a chain spans
   multiple PEPP-PT participating countries.
4. Scalable backend architecture and technology that can be deployed with local IT infrastructure.
5. Certification service to test and ensure local implementations use the PEPP-PT mechanisms in a secure and interoperable manner.

On demand, PEPP-PT will supply support services for national initiatives:

1. Support in implementing and financing local installation and trust campaigns.
2. If a local trust-center is not possible in the desirable time or national resources are not
   available, PEPP-PT will, either temporarily or for the long term, supply a scalable
   infrastructure that follows strict European data protection and privacy standards.
3. A repository of software components, advertising campaigns, and best practices used
   successfully by PEPP-PT members and shared with the community.

The PEPP-PT initiative is financed through donations. It has adopted the WHO standards for such financing to avoid any external influence.

The PEPP-PT team includes scientists, technologists and experts from well-known international research institutions and companies whose expertise spans the areas of communication, psychology, epidemiology, proximity-tracing, security, privacy, encryption, data protection, application development, scalable systems, supercomputing infrastructure, and artificial intelligence.