Technologies

In public health, contact tracing is the process to identify individuals who have been in contact with infected persons. Proximity tracing with smartphone applications and sensors could support contact tracing. It involves processing of sensitive personal data.
What is Contact Tracing?

During epidemics of infectious diseases, such as the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), it is important to lower the number of new infection cases and to stop it eventually. Therefore the infection chain of onward transmissions must be interrupted. When those persons known to be infected reveal their recent contacts, other infected persons may be identified, informed and e.g. isolated already early on, even before they become aware of their infection. The process to identify contacts of known cases is called contact tracing.
A person becomes a contact of a primary case by e.g. face-to-face contact within a short distance over some time span, physical contact or spending time indoors together–all within the incubation period of e.g. up to 2 weeks for the coronavirus disease.

To establish the risk exposure in contact tracing, information about the distance between the persons and the duration of contact are important. Close contacts with high-risk exposure may then become subject to different rules or treatments.

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The EDPS-Civil society summit is an annual meeting between the EDPS and civil society organisations organized to discuss the state of data protection and privacy in the EU.

The 2020 edition will focus on a number of issues relating facial recognition, biometric surveillance technologies and its effects on activists
in the EU.

The Summit is part of Privacy Camp 2020.

Register here.

You can follow the event on our Twitter account and participate in the conversation using the hashtag #PrivacyCamp20.

The modern car is a computer on four wheels. Today’s cars are constantly processing and transmitting data about themselves, their surroundings and the people in it – in most of the cases even without the knowledge of the driver. This data is used in navigation, to manage car systems like the engine or to deliver communication and infotainment services to passengers.

Increasingly today, the data generated by the car is shared over the internet with other vehicles, traffic infrastructure and private and public entities. These so-called connected cars belong to the evolving Internet of Things (IoT) - with manifold related risks attached. The growing amount of personal data generated by connected cars raises the interest of insurers, automakers, law enforcement authorities and other third parties.

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This report provides an overview of the activities carried out by the EDPS from 2015-2019. In particular, it focuses on how the EDPS has worked towards implementing the objectives set out in the EDPS Strategy 2015-2019, which relate to digitisation, global partnerships and the modernisation of data protection. This involved not only contributing historical pieces of legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation and Regulation 2018/1725, but also bringing the concepts of ethics and accountability to the forefront of data protection discourse and application.

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To tackle climate change, the European Union has set itself a target to ensure that 80% of EU consumers are using smart meters by 2020. This should accelerate the move towards cleaner energy and reduce energy consumption. The European Commission issued a Recommendation on preparations for the roll-out of smart metering systems in 2012. Today, there are an increasing number of smart meters being used across the EU and integrated with other smart home appliances.

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