An independent group, including Christian Laux, has developed a governance framework to protect our civil liberties in the use of tracing apps, which is currently being hotly debated as the lockdown is loosened and which is challenging our civil society.

With societies preparing for an exit from lockdown, Tracing Apps become important. In his april-column on inside-IT Christian Laux discusses the promising protocol used by WeTrace, as well as the PEPP-PT initiative. “We must be critical”.

With the “Ordinance 2 on measures to combat coronavirus (COVID-19)”, it is legally possible to carry out all types of assemblies and meetings entirely digitally in Switzerland for the very first time. This approach, which is unusual for local standards, is initially limited in time until 19 April 2020. It is worth taking a look at the new possibilities. A classification of Art. 6a COVID-19-Ordinance.

Effective as of January 2020, Microsoft has moved all data protection related terms from their “Online Services Terms (OST)” document to a new separate document called Online Services Data Protection Addendum (DPA). Read more about the update in our current Policy Alert.

Open Data has a lot of potential, and the IT world should put more focus on Open Data. Christian Laux suggests Open Data as a way out from a political dispute about whether nationality and origin of suspected offenders should be disclosed in the Police’s twitter feeds etc.

On 27 November 2019, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA announced that it is definitively implementing the small banks regime at circular level as of 1 January 2020. This includes a generally applicable change in regulation (i.e. not only to small banks) with regard to Circular 2018/3 (Outsourcing Banks and Insurers), which has quite some practical effect.