Smittestopp − A Case Study on Digital Contact Tracing

Abstract

This open access book describes Smittestopp, the first Norwegian system for digital contact tracing of Covid-19 infections, which was developed in March and early April 2020. The system was deployed after five weeks of development and was active for a little more than two months, when a drop in infection levels in Norway and privacy concerns led to shutting it down. The intention of this book is twofold. First, it reports on the design choices made in the development phase. Second, as one of the only systems in the world that collected population data into a central database and which was used for an entire population, we can share experience on how the design choices impacted the system's operation. By sharing lessons learned and the challenges faced during the development and deployment of the technology, we hope that this book can be a valuable guide for experts from different domains, such as big data collection and analysis, application development, and deployment in a national population, as well as digital tracing.