The European Commission has responded to the regional scramble for apps and data to help tackle the coronavirus crisis by calling for a common EU approach to boost the effectiveness of digital interventions and ensure key rights and freedoms are respected. The European Union’s executive body wants to ensure Member States’ individual efforts to use data and tech tools to combat COVID-19 are aligned and can interoperate across borders — and therefore be more effective, given the virus does not respect national borders. Current efforts by governments across the EU to combat the virus are being hampered by the fragmentation of approaches, it warns. At the same time its recommendation puts a strong focus on the need to ensure that fundamental EU rights do not get overridden in the rush to mitigate the spread of the virus — with the Commission urging public health authorities and research institutions to observe a key EU legal principle of data minimization when processing personal data for a coronavirus purpose. Specifically it writes that these bodies should apply what it calls “appropriate safeguards” — listing pseudonymization, aggregation, encryption and decentralization as examples of best practice. The Commission’s thinking is that getting EU citizens to trust digital efforts — such as the myriad of COVID-19 contacts tracing apps now in development — will be key to their success by helping to drive uptake and usage, which means core rights like privacy take on additional significance at a moment of public health crisis. Commenting in a statement, commissioner for the EU’s internal market, Thierry Breton said: “Digital technologies, mobile applications and mobility data have enormous potential to help understand how the virus spreads and to respond effectively.