SwissCovid in the Perspective of its Goals

SwissCovid is the Swiss digital contact tracing app which was deployed to help fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. Its development was arbitrated by Apple and Google who made their technology de facto unavoidable. After a year of activity, it is high time to evaluate how effective it has been in its mission. Nearly 21% of the Swiss population is 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 are discovered by SwissCovid and much less than 2% of SwissCovid alerts are useful while SwissCovid generates 5% of the quarantines. Distances in proximity are loosely measured and durations of encounters 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.