Agreement will enable tracing apps to ‘speak to each other’

Gibraltar is to form part of an agreement with the United Kingdom and Crown Dependencies to help connect Covid tracing apps.

The aim of this agreement is to help disrupt the further spread of coronavirus by ensuring apps in different locations can communicate with each other.

The jurisdictions that form part of this Memorandum of Understanding have developed an app using the Google-Apple API.

A spokesman for No.6 Convent Place said: “This allows interoperability between the Apps to seamlessly deliver Exposure Notifications in circumstances where the user of an App in one jurisdiction has been in close proximity to the user of an App in another jurisdiction and one of the users has received a positive Covid-19 test result.”

“The Agreement describes how this capability can be delivered using interoperability between the jurisdictions.”

Minister for Digital and Financial Services, Albert Isola, said: “This agreement brings many benefits to Gibraltar in the fight against Covid-19, not least the ability for us to better monitor and control the effects of travel between Gibraltar and the UK.”

“It allows the different versions of the Contact Tracing Apps developed to fight Covid-19 to speak to each other, thereby eliminating the need to develop or install different versions of the App.”

“An important next step in the strategy is to develop a memorandum of understanding with mainland Europe, to extend the important benefits of interoperability to all nations as people strive to return to a normal way of living, where free travel forms part of business, personal and tourism trips.”