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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2020, @05:30PM
I'm not very convinced by your gut feelings on the matter. I'm more convinced by several thousand years of documented examples of humans acting like humans in all their glory as well as pettiness. Ascribing untoward motivations largely to one group has shown itself to stink of abject ignorance, malfeasance, disingeniousness, or a litany of other appeals to Man's darker impulses. We've gone from exhorting the truth and virtuousness of those outside the Five Eyes to narrowing to one particular eye. I would remind you there are several hundred other eyes out there, some far larger and, to some, far more menacing than your One Big Eye, and I would wager that almost to an Eye, they all fall within a very narrow distribution of each other.
In one very important way that the One Big Eye stands out is in the relative openness and freedom of information that surrounds it that exposes so many of the warts and blemishes you don't see elsewhere. A great many of those other Eyes are made up with lovely mascara and liner, and appear so very attractive in comparison to the unadorned Big Eye, and many are taken by that beauty.