# staway covid

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On the 14th of October, the Portuguese prime minister, following a government meeting after a spike in COVID-19 cases throughout the country, announced that the he would propose and seek approval of a law in parliament to make mandatory the use of masks in public streets and the use of the contact tracing app “Stayaway Covid” by all armed forces, public workers and in schools and working environments.

The Portuguese contact-tracing app, officially introduced on the 1st of September, based on the DP^3T protocol and the GAEN api, had failed to meet the expectations of the official organizations with just around 1,7 million app downloads (Portugal's population is around 10 million) and in an universe of 37.687 cases, only around 300 codes were inserted in the system.

EDRi-member D3 - Defesa dos Direitos Digitais (D3) [1] has been running a campaign [2] exposing the risks of this kind of apps to control the ongoing pandemic and its ineffectiveness, long before the official app was introduced.

Following the Prime Minister announcement, D3 was quick to react on social media and in the press condemning this measure as an authoritarianism that does not belong in Europe. The mandatory usage of an app would cast many doubts on the constitucionality of the law, specially concerning the lack of evidence on its effectiveness - which would be crucial in the proportionality assessment required for the restriction of fundamental rights - and the practial enforcement by police forces.
It would also represent a break of trust in the government, which had garanteed the adoption of the app would be optional, and would likely represent a breach of the terms and conditions of Google and Apple's API, which the companies had made available for the governements to implement DP^3T based apps.
D3 made it clear that was ready to use any legal means available to block any piece of legislation that would make the use of the app mandatory.

In the following days this subject obtained wide national press coverage, with D3 getting plenty of public interventions and mentions on major portuguese news organizations. Fortunately, the majority of the portuguese public society and political parties declared to be against this measure or to have doubts about its constitutionality, including the President and even members of the parliament from the ruling party.

Given the apparent consensus on the use of masks in the street vs. the lack of consensus concerning the mandatory use of the app, on the 20th of October, the government decided to try getting the former through the Parliament first, and postponed the discussion on the mandatory use of the contact-tracing app, at least for now.

[1] - direitosdigitais.pt

[2] - rastreamento.pt

[3] - https://direitosdigitais.pt/comunicacao/comunicados/106-comunicado-sobre-stayaway