It’s the health service for the whole of the UK, not just England.
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UK Pursues Centralized Coronavirus Contact Tracing App, Rejects Apple-Google Solution
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Taking an optimistic view, governments are just not privacy-oriented in the first place. For Apple / Google privacy is important for many reasons: One and possibly foremost, if they have your location data there is always the danger that they get a subpoena from the police and have to spend time and money to supply the data - not having your data in the first place gets nicely around it. Second and equally important, their customers want privacy, so again they are forced to handle privacy well. And third, the only way to get it "private enough" is to hire someone who is really keen on privacy, and good at it, and you get "as private as can be achieved" which is likely a lot better than "private enough". They don't want anybody to be able to say "you could have improved it".
Governments don't have that motivation, that's why they fail at privacy. Not out of malice. That's me being optimistic.
I work for an oil company and we still use faxes and carbon paper 😂😂
Hopefully they do a U-turn when they see only a few people downloading it.
The reviews from the people who do download the app will undoubtedly mention ruined battery life, it being a pain to keep needing to open the app, and it interrupting while trying to do other things.
The reviews from the people who do download the app will undoubtedly mention ruined battery life, it being a pain to keep needing to open the app, and it interrupting while trying to do other things.
So I guess the UK doesn’t really care about contact tracing and lowering infections...
The British are the first to admit the NHS has many flaws. It’s the ‘they’re turning into socialists’ bit we resent from people who don’t understand how it works. Oh and that we have bad teeth.
Do you understand how contract tracing and epidemiology work?
Not sure what you mean with the ‘thankfully’ bit. Kindly elaborate?
Or just don’t install the app while the government / NHS maintains this stance.
Your all happy to have facebook and google maps apps tracking your every move for years though ?
Anyone working for the government who thinks they can out do Apple and Google is delusional, but that is what you get with the government.
One thing the NHS has never been able to get right is technology.
They spent £7bn on 'System one' it does not work. Every hospital uses a different e-notes system, that often are not compatible with each other.
I work for the NHS and there is a near meltdown of some system or another every shift.
Trying to build, launch and Track their own data system WILL NOT WORK. It won't, I can promise.
They spent £7bn on 'System one' it does not work. Every hospital uses a different e-notes system, that often are not compatible with each other.
I work for the NHS and there is a near meltdown of some system or another every shift.
Trying to build, launch and Track their own data system WILL NOT WORK. It won't, I can promise.
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From the article, this is a great misunderstanding of how Apple and Google's exposure notification works.
In a very basic form, there is a central cloud service for each approved app. So the UK might have an approved app and Germany might have their own approved app. Each service (UK, Germany, etc.) would maintain at least a central list of anonymized identifiers of people who tested positive. If a user installs and uses an app, the app would download a list of identifiers which correlate to anonymized people who tested positive. Then, the downloaded list is compared to a a (hopefully only) locally on-device maintained list of anonymous identifiers of people "seen" recently (e.g. anyone detected via Bluetooth handshake/data exchanges for the past few weeks).
Individual smartphones cannot directly send alerts to other smartphones via this API (if that were the case then you can identify everyone who has been in contact).
It can be relatively anonymous and not everyone needs to participate for it to be successful. As an aside, apps might do more than just send/receive the anonymous identifiers. Location data and other identifying data could be sent. Hopefully Apple and Google do some thorough checks during app approval.
Thankyou! People keep saying that and it had me wondering what I was missing. I think what they mean is the log of interactions is decentralised; only the log of which IDs are infected is centralised.
Err, just don’t install the app?
Being English I know lots of English people. I don’t know any who don’t admit the NHS has room for improvement.
I can’t stand this government, but I don’t agree with the fears of an ulterior, Orwellian motivation behind this. I don‘t like them or trust them but I don’t see any indication they they have a tendency towards big-stateism, and given the limitations of this it wouldn’t be much use for them anyway. Any individual wishing to hide their movement from the state can just opt out. Given the situation it’s probably worth taking the risk and giving them the benefit of the doubt for now I think.
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All of this is so amazingly tone deaf. New York City random testing indicates 25% have been exposed. There is no way to contain Corona. It’s far too late.
That said, so what? If 25% (2.2M) had it and only 12,000 have died in NYC, the mortality rate is something on the order of 0.54%.
I got it, I survived it, it sucked. I hurt for four weeks, had fevers, shakes, night sweats, muscle aches, the whole shebang, but I got over it. I’m 52, I’m fat, I have diabetes and asthma. If I didn’t die, you probably won’t either, along with the VAST majority of people who got it.
Tracking our movements is way, way, way more than a bridge too far. What an ungodly Orwellian nightmare!
Oh yeah, the number of US deaths from all causes dropped by over 23,000 for the week ending 4/18 (from the pre-Corona baseline). It dropped in that week by about the same number of people who have died from Corona in the US for the duration of the epidemic.
Table 1, Page 2.
If you subtract the Corona deaths that happened in the week ending 4/18, the number of deaths from all other causes is even lower than it should be by that amount And easily exceeds the number of total US deaths from Corona.
That said, so what? If 25% (2.2M) had it and only 12,000 have died in NYC, the mortality rate is something on the order of 0.54%.
I got it, I survived it, it sucked. I hurt for four weeks, had fevers, shakes, night sweats, muscle aches, the whole shebang, but I got over it. I’m 52, I’m fat, I have diabetes and asthma. If I didn’t die, you probably won’t either, along with the VAST majority of people who got it.
Tracking our movements is way, way, way more than a bridge too far. What an ungodly Orwellian nightmare!
Oh yeah, the number of US deaths from all causes dropped by over 23,000 for the week ending 4/18 (from the pre-Corona baseline). It dropped in that week by about the same number of people who have died from Corona in the US for the duration of the epidemic.
Table 1, Page 2.
If you subtract the Corona deaths that happened in the week ending 4/18, the number of deaths from all other causes is even lower than it should be by that amount And easily exceeds the number of total US deaths from Corona.
Any tech solution built by the public sector will not work. This project is sadly now doomed to failure.
The most important thing for this kind of app to work for its stated purpose is for as many people as possible to use it.
By rejecting Apple’s approach they are not going to achieve that. So it’s a bad decision, IMHO.
By rejecting Apple’s approach they are not going to achieve that. So it’s a bad decision, IMHO.
The problem with all of the COVID-19 hysteria is that we simply do not know the denominator, the true number of infected individuals. So how can we assume to know much about fatality and virulence? The virus looks terrible when looking at known infection rate vs mortality, but we don’t know the true infection rate. We have had several tests in the U.S. that show statistically significant numbers of tested individuals that have Ab to SARS-CoV2. That means they were previously infected and didn’t know it. How many thousands or more will that be true for? We don’t know until we continue to test.
On topic, this is a dangerously slippery slope into big brother intrusion like we’ve never seen before, and quite frankly, large governments are always the greatest threat to a free people. I would never download such an app on my phone.
On topic, this is a dangerously slippery slope into big brother intrusion like we’ve never seen before, and quite frankly, large governments are always the greatest threat to a free people. I would never download such an app on my phone.
You know those people who eagerly adopt every new technology long before it’s usefully stable and effective, just because its “OMG NEW!!1!”? (like I remember people excitingly recommending voice recognition in the 80’s, when it could rarely recognize two words together), and then they eagerly demonstrate it to everyone (over and over, sigh), and it doesn’t really work at all, but they keep making excuses for it?
That’s what the U.K. implementation sounds like - it’ll sorta work, occasionally, if everyone keeps the app constantly woken up on their phone. And it’ll put people at greater risk than if they used the Apple/Google always-active API. They’re going to end up with a few more deaths, because they want to do it their way. Hope their centralized database is worth those few extra lives.
That’s what the U.K. implementation sounds like - it’ll sorta work, occasionally, if everyone keeps the app constantly woken up on their phone. And it’ll put people at greater risk than if they used the Apple/Google always-active API. They’re going to end up with a few more deaths, because they want to do it their way. Hope their centralized database is worth those few extra lives.
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I’d like to know the EXACT thinking of not using a free secure technology provided by a company that’s actually good at this rather than half arse attempt the government will Make that no one will install.
Total BS and not needed. COVID is an over exaggerated power grab. The fake news models were wrong, period. Now we have to be tracked? Can we say Mark of the Beast? No country should ever have this kind of power over the people. This app is a volition of human rights.
