NHS Covid-19 app update blocked for breaking Apple and Google's rules
bbc.com
bbc.com
To which Google and Apple said "hard NO".
Which is the correct response to privacy-violating function creep.
I think Apple/Google should put a little bit more effort into this -- this sort of tech is going to be essential in getting countries re-opened safely, especially with questions around the efficacy of vaccines with some of these new COVID variants.
Anyone who's worried about the privacy can simply choose not to scan the QR codes (or not enable the feature / install the app).
Apple and Google then proved that effective contact tracing was possible without building a centralized location repository and offered a toolkit based on that approach. The next iteration - ground-up rewrite, really - of the NHS app then used that toolkit, and functioned just fine.
Data minimisation / parsimony of collection is one of the principles enshrined in UK data protection law. It's common sense, too. One cannot leak or misuse data one doesn't collect. Since the NHS app worked just fine without uploading location history to a central repository, it follows that the reason for wanting to do this anyway was unrelated to the app's ostensible purpose.
Plenty of venues and shops make it a condition of entry now to scan their QR code into the NHS app. Not scanning the code, or not having the app installed means no entry to shops and (takeaway) restaurants. The thing is becoming compulsory by the back door. A choice not to install or use it no longer exists. This is worrying in its own right, but it is also a very good reason to insist that its data collection and use are limited to what is strictly necessary for the app to function.
Is there still evidence for this type of contact tracing? Was it ever even shown to work or reduce infection?
It seems now we should just be focusing on vaccinating everyone. Everything else is just noise at this point or political virtue signaling.
For example, for ~3 months we had:
- 1 person could go grocery shopping once per day for 1 hour
- you could only go outside for a maximum of 1 hour per day for excervise only
- every single organisation (other than critical care locations) had their physical locations shut down
- everyone was mandated to wear masks outside of their residence
And a bunch more...
We had ~5 community cases identified in Brisbane recently and the entire city went into an instant hard lockdown for 3 days whilst contact tracers worked out the scale of the issue.
It has nothing to do with how many cases we have, but everything to do with how harshly and rapidly we prevent community interaction.
The drastic difference in outcome so far compared to Australia boils down to just a few differences, as far as I can tell:
* we never truly closed the border. We should probably have tried harder, but it is impossible to strictly do so with the USA, at least. The majority of cases in last March and April were from American visitors, and locals who had travelled there. Those seeds of outbreak seem to still be the main strain circulating now.
* our lockdowns were not quite as strict, or strictly enforced, and were more haphazard for when they were applied and when they were loosened
* testing was not deployed as rapidly or widely
* contact tracing becomes less and less feasible with the more cases there are, and past a tipping point it becomes hopeless to expect it will actually contain it (though they certainly still try)
"Australia has done better than other countries" is correlation. Is it causation?
I'm not sure what you mean by "this type". What you've quoted is how contact tracing works. It does work, see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4