article updated at 9:04 am on Wednesday 26 May with the note from the ministry relating to Immunes and privacy
At the ministry for innovation and ecological transition, these are busy days. On the Green Pass, the green certificate that will allow us to travel freely in the summer in Europe, many points remain open. Let’s start with what Minister Colao said on Monday in the Italian Tech forum.
How will it be
“It will be a QRCode that can be found everywhere,” said the minister. Everywhere where, how and when it is more complicated to determine.
To date
“The European version, which we have already tested, satisfies us, we are happy with the results. I think we will be ready in mid-June and will start on July 1.” start. July 1st is considered the deadline, the current attempt is to bring forward the release by about ten days, but it is not just a technological problem. It is a matter of European standards under discussion; and of authorization from the Guarantor for privacy.
How does it work
“If I have that certificate, I won’t have to do quarantines. I won’t have to submit to possible restrictions if things change. It’s a certificate, it’s not a passport.” This means that it must be shown along with a valid ID.
Who is entitled to it
Who got the vaccine, of course. And who had the covid. “It can also be obtained by not having the vaccine, but having had the swab in the previous hours. It’s a bit more boring, it costs more ”. And obviously the validity period of the pass with a tampon lasts less.
How to get it
Through the internet, above all. “But maybe you don’t even have to download it. You will likely receive a notification on your smartphone. Whoever has the IO app will receive it directly in the IO app ”, says the Minister. Eleven million Italians have already downloaded it. Many but not many. And this opens up other scenarios and some problems.
I minorenni
They cannot take the SPID, the digital identity system, with which to activate IO. And therefore they are excluded from this mode. They point out to the Ministry that IO is also activated through CIE, the electronic identity card, which however is not yet so widespread and that in some municipalities it has long waiting times. How to solve the problem? Sogei, the information company of the Treasury Ministry, would also be working to find alternative tools that are not yet known or clear.
Green pass, Minister Colao to Italian Tech: “It will be a QR code and will arrive on the Io app and on Immuni”
The Immune Rebus
Among the alternatives to the study is the Immuni app, the one launched a year ago for contact tracing, downloaded by over ten million people and essentially useless for its purpose. Already a month ago, Minister Colao had said that the use of Immuni was also being studied for the Green Pass, arousing various perplexities. In fact, Immuni was born as an app that guarantees the total anonymity of those who use it: it was the promise made for it to be downloaded; and the condition of the Privacy Guarantor to authorize it.
How does an intrinsically anonymous app receive a green certificate that its user can move freely? It is not clear. But in the meantime on the site where the various versions of the software are released a few days ago traces of an update were noticed. And in the forum on Monday at Italian Tech, Minister Colao confirmed that the Immuni track is still theoretically practicable. “Immuni will also have the certificate inside”. For now it is a good omen. For this to be possible, it is necessary to have the go-ahead from the Privacy Guarantor (far from obvious); and then it will be the individual user who will be recognized and identified in some way, for example by entering the tax code. Note: Immuni was not usable for minors. Hence the need for a further path.
Immuni, the note from the ministry
Precisely on the issue of privacy, the ministry specified with a note that “on Immuni the certificate will not arrive with a notification, as on IO “, because” it is a tool through which the citizen will be able to download the certificate with a disposable password, without being identified. This action will not have any kind of impact on privacy. The tool is and will remain absolutely privacy preserving, i.e. the citizen’s information will not leave the mobile device nor will it be related to the contact tracing information since the flow is one-way: from the central database (managed by Sogei) that will manage the certificates, towards the cell phone of the citizen himself “.
anticipation
The technology behind the Green Pass
by Alessandro Longo
Sogei
The last hypothesis being worked on is to have the Green Pass downloaded using the tax code or health card from a site still under construction by Sogei; or from your electronic health record (which, however, in many Regions has adoption percentages close to zero). Parents should also be able to do this for children who have been subjected to a negative swab or have recovered from Covid-19 (the vaccination hypothesis is currently not contemplated for minors), obviously using their respective tax codes. All this will be possible thanks to a new infrastructure also managed by Sogei, which will collect all the information relating to the Pass (vaccination certificates, tampons, healing certificates) and therefore will allow access to the IO and Immune apps. Technically it means that Sogei is creating the Api (the acronym stands for Application Program Interface), the “windows” for accessing these data and will provide them to those who develop Immuni and IO to be integrated within them.
Pass vaccination, the guarantor for privacy: “Personal data at risk, that’s not the case. The government changes it”
by Andrea Iannuzzi
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