In the evening today, the extraordinary commissioner for the health emergency, Domenico Arcuri, signed the order with which the Italian government has chosen the application that can be used for contact tracing (“contact tracing”), in an attempt to reduce the spread of the coronavirus in Italy. The app will be called “Immuni” and was developed by Bending Spoons, a company based in Milan and with a strong presence in the app market, in collaboration with Centro Medico Santagostino (CMS). The news of the imminent signature of the ordinance had been anticipated by the Gazette, and the text of the ordinance was published in the evening by Repubblica.
So far, not much information has been released on the app created by Bending Spoons with the CMS, but it should have a similar operation to what Apple and Google are working on, therefore based on Bluetooth technology (BLE). Simplifying a lot, through the app each smartphone periodically emits a unique and anonymous identification code (ID) that can be picked up by other smartphones using the same app nearby, within a few meters. If one of the owners of the app reports that they have tested positive for coronavirus, the system allows you to notify the people they had been in proximity to in the previous days.
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The application was made with a rather flexible approach. The basic idea is that others can be added to the basic functions, in a modular way, in order to quickly offer new versions of the app that meet various needs. Immuni will include a sort of “clinical diary” where each user can keep information on their health conditions, with the possibility of updating it in case of changes.
Use of Immuni will be on a voluntary basis, through download from the App Store (Apple) and Google Play Store (Google). In the last few days Immuni was given a ballot with another app called CovidApp.
Bending Spoons is part of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) initiative, a collaboration launched at European level to establish common solutions for contact tracing, which are both useful and able to protect privacy. of users. In the presentation document, PEPP-PT explains that he has thought of systems such as Bluetooth to detect any contacts at risk for contagion, so that the data are managed anonymously and remain mostly on the smartphones of individual users. The basic idea is the same as Apple and Google, but it is not yet clear how they will be able to change the apps when the tracking is made possible directly thanks to their operating systems.
