Not only is the UK contact tracing app a privacy nightmare — it also just won’t work
Isn’t it funny that this whole time, we weren’t aware that the UK government could do a better job than Google and Apple combined?
Okay just for a second imagine that this whole Coronavirus thing doesn’t exist, and that you get to be an early adopter of a cool new app. As an early adopter of this app, you get to choose:
☝️OPTION ONE: the app will be built by both Google and Apple, working together, in an unprecedented tech giant mega-merge, the likes of which the world has never seen.
OR
✌️OPTION TWO: the app will be built by the UK government, a group of people who get their emails printed out for them by their interns.
Gosh what a TOUGH choice. Of course, when it comes to the contact tracing apps that both parties are building, you don’t get a choice at all. UK residents will be stuck with a clunky piece of rubbish that doesn’t work, and the rest of the world will be at the mercy of Apple and Google, just like they have been already for the past decade.
So, as is usual with tech and government, the people who these decisions have the most affect on, have little say in the matter. Some people would call that, oh I don’t know, undemocratic? 🤔
NHSX vs Google and Apple; how are the proposals different?
First of all, kudos for sticking an X onto the end of NHS 👏. Second of all, I would like to point out that I love the idea of a contact tracing app, made by the digital arm of the NHS. Like every other sane person, I enjoy universal healthcare, and the NHS should be receiving more money from the government to build useful digital products for us all to use.
However, the execution of this app smacks of the same bloated, righteous energy of a tech billionaire running for governor. They clearly have no idea what they’re doing, so why not seek outside help? Like say from Apple and Google, who have decades of experience? No? You’re right. The Empire is always right.
In order to work effectively, this app would have to be running in the foreground at all times
Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary very clearly explained that his app is far superior to what Apple and Google are putting together. Why? Because it’s centralised. That’s it; that’s the reason. Apple and Google are working together to build something decentralised, and the government in the UK argue that this does not contain the functionality they require to actually track the virus as it spreads (and of course track UK citizens along the way…).
🦠 The NHSX app works like this:
- People who have the app go about their lives, and the app passively tracks their proximity to each other, via bluetooth signals. In the same way your phone ‘finds’ your bluetooth headphones, it will simply be finding other phones.
- If you get symptoms, you tell the app. The app then pings everyone who you’ve come into close proximity to, therefore warning them that they may have been exposed to the virus.
- Your bluetooth proximity data then also gets sent to a central server so that teams of science experts can look at it and build prediction models or something.
🦠 The Google/Apple proposition works like this:
- As above, but the data in question stays on everyone’s individual phone, and is therefore decentralised, to a degree.
- That is because they are not working on a single app, but an API that other apps can use, meaning that any health authorities planning on building a contact tracing app can simply use this bluetooth proximity functionality without building it themselves.
- Seeing as this API is a collaboration between Google and Apple, the bluetooth broadcasting will work across both Android and iOS (in theory…)
The issue with both proposals is that, in order to work, they depend heavily on both widespread adoption (not everyone has a bluetooth enabled phone), and blind trust from the general public. Oh and one more thing: once in the hands of the people, these solutions actually need to work.
🤦🏻♀️ Why the NHSX app simply will not work
The centralised VS decentralised argument holds absolutely no water, because it’s irrelevant. The passive tracking via bluetooth that NHSX want to achieve is not actually possible. Apple’s iOS does not allow bluetooth broadcasting from apps running in the background. That means this app would have to be running in the foreground at all times. What a treat… you may as well just have two phones.
Apple does have a workaround for this, but it’s fiddly, and will not fulfil the crucial criteria of being ‘on all the time’. The workaround allows for bluetooth signals to be sent while in the background, but only to other iOS devices. Even then, broadcasting will be interrupted if the device is already sending other signals (you know like if you’re using bluetooth headphones).
The limitations of the app are significant, and it’s unclear if the government have taken them under consideration
In Google’s case, Android phones do allow such bluetooth announcements to be made from the background, but only for a few minutes. With Android, you can run such a service constantly, so that the bluetooth is still working away while you use other apps, but that would result in a lot more battery drain, which people obviously don’t like.
These limitations are significant, and it’s unclear if the government have taken them under consideration. What they seem to be failing to realise is that Google and Apple aren’t trying to rival them with a better app; they are literally offering up an extremely powerful API that will handle the contact tracing for them perfectly, across both platforms. NHSX could very easily plug this functionality right into their app, but as is usual with the mindless posturing of UK government big dick energy, they are flat-out refusing to seek very valuable outside help.
It’s almost as if the launching of this app seeks to satisfy an ulterior motive, like say, some kind of accurate social graph of the UK 🤔. More on that later. For now we UK citizens await this baby-deer-standing-up-for-the-first-time excuse for an app in eagerness.
