Short abstract:

This paper examines the challenge of interoperability in digital contact tracing during the pandemic focusing on the border between France and Switzerland. Divergent views on digital sovereignty and privacy led to incompatible systems, highlighting vulnerabilities in cross-border pandemic management

Long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed at the forefront of public debate the capacity of states to manage the spread of the virus in a coordinated and effective way across borders. Among the tools used to combat the pandemic, contact tracing applications have been developed in many countries to loosen total national lockdowns. While most European countries developed their own digital contact tracing solutions, only a few managed to ensure some kind of interoperability among their tracing infrastructures. Such infrastructural interoperability was particularly important for those large life basins that sprawl across borders, such as the Rhône-Alpes and the Lake Geneva life basin between France and Switzerland. This paper presents the results of a study retracing the innovation journeys of the French and Swiss solutions in this context. It demonstrates how conflicting visions about the roles of the state, Google, and Apple, and their implications for digital sovereignty and privacy, led to the creation of two entirely incompatible digital infrastructures for citizen epidemic self-monitoring. Cross-border movements in this life basin were overlooked. Addressing them would have required not only overcoming interoperability issues arising from incompatible algorithms, architectures, and institutional configurations but also those related to the app’s integration within a broader pandemic crisis management, namely the testing, tracing, isolating strategy, and associated rights and obligations. The discrepancies between the two national solutions ultimately underscore that contact tracing apps are only effective within the national frameworks for which they were created, revealing multilayered vulnerabilities in European cross-border situations.