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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @03:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the roll-your-own dept.

NHS rejects Apple-Google coronavirus app plan:

The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.

The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen.

That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries.

[...] "Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life," said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit.

[...] Like the authorities in many other countries, NHSX has opted to use wireless Bluetooth transmissions to keep track of each qualifying meeting, and has said that the alerts will be sent anonymously, so that users do not know who triggered them.

It has opted for a "centralised model" to achieve this - meaning that the matching process, which works out which phones to send alerts to - happens on a computer server.

This contrasts with Apple and Google's "decentralised" approach - where the matches take place on users' handsets.

The tech giants believe their effort provides more privacy, as it limits the ability of either the authorities or a hacker to use the computer server logs to track specific individuals and identify their social interactions.

But NHSX believes a centralised system will give it more insight into Covid-19's spread, and therefore how to evolve the app accordingly.

"One of the advantages is that it's easier to audit the system and adapt it more quickly as scientific evidence accumulates," Prof Christophe Fraser, one of the epidemiologists advising NHSX, told the BBC.

[...] But hundreds of the country's cryptography and computer security experts have just signed an open letter calling on it to reconsider. Dozens of those opponents work for Inria, the institution tasked with building the app.

For its part, the European Commission has indicated that either model is acceptable.

"All countries deploying an app must put adoption at the front of their mind, and if it doesn't work well or significantly depletes battery life then that may act as a deterrent, particularly for those with older phones," commented DP3T's Dr Michael Veale.

[...] Australia is the latest country to release a contact-tracing app. It too had indicated it had found a way to work around Apple's restrictions, but has since acknowledged power consumption problems as well as "interference" if users have other Bluetooth and location-tracking apps open.

Related:
Decentralized Protocol Removed From EU Contact Tracing Website Without Notice
Contact Tracing in the Real World
Apple and Google are Launching a Joint COVID-19 Tracing Tool for IOS and Android
Senators Raise Privacy Questions About Google's COVID-19 Tracker


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @02:39PM (#987823)

    After the 1st eye there's a rrrrreeal big fucking drop off. Google+Apple and Microsoft are happy servants of the the 1 big eye.