NHS Covid-19 app update blocked for breaking Apple and Google's rules (opens in new tab)

> nobody should be forced to help the government implement something unethical

Nobody is forced to install the app at all (at least in the UK's case).

And if they do, they're not forced to share their location anyway.

On the other hand, anyone who has an Android phone is forced to share tons of data with Google. And the cost of not having one is much higher than the cost of not having the government's app.

> Can't speak for Google's case - but Apple certainly goes to great pains to make it clear they don't collect location data on users - it's left on the user's device.

This is not true at all - as the researcher from Trinity College found out a bit of time ago, Apple collects people location data even if they're not logged into the Apple account: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/android-sends-20x-mo...

It's very clearly marked as being collected, so I'm not sure why this myth of Apple not collecting data is being perpetuated. It's seriously misleading actual iOS users about their privacy.

If you're trying to make a case that Apple is my ally against government, I understand but disagree that Apple's privacy policy makes them my ally.

Well put! These are the moments which everyone remembers and refers back to when the next troll comes along and claims that Apple must allow third party app stores.

Apple definitely have a stronger case here, because as you say, they do more generally go to lengths to protect user privacy. That being said, they do use location-based advertising themselves.

After seeing what Facebook would let the Russian government do, who in the U.S. government would cross them unless they had momentum for an antitrust suit and that includes a Supreme Court ready to enforce a pro-citizen regime.

> coupled with incompetent IT project management

The UK Government have made a pig's ear of pretty much the whole of their Covid response precisely because they refuse to engage with anyone who might actually know what they're doing. Everything's been outsourced at great expense to private companies operating on a wing and a prayer basis. Millions of pounds and many weeks' of time early on in the pandemic was wasted building a bespoke app that anyone with any experience told them wouldn't work. They finally were forced into an embarrassing climbdown where they had to accept the Google/Apple solution that they'd previously dismissed as not good enough.

The only thing they've done well is the vaccine programme because they actually let the National Health Service get on with it instead of letting some big outsourcing company flounder about expensively.

> There seems to be a bit of a "We're the government, so they'll have to do what we ask/tell" going on here I suspect

That's the case (they are the government, they are in control, not Apple or Google), and certainly it should have been the case considering the situation. But that would have required the government to show some backbone and to use the power at its disposal. Instead it seems that the issue has been politically controversial so that the government decided not to act decisively on track and trace apps overall.

This is continuing with the controversy over "vaccine passports".

I'm not sure you can call it an agreement in any true sense. Apple and Google dictated the terms for accessing the Bluetooth hardware in the particular way required. Many governments around the world wanted more direct access to the hardware than Apple/Google have permitted, or (voluntary or otherwise) access to location data. Google and Apple said if you don't agree to these terms, you don't get to access anything.

I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong or right. You could argue they're defending the user's rights against the tyranny of the British government. Or you could say they're constraining the user's and their democratically elected government's rights to voluntarily use data to help end a pandemic, while at the same time profiting off it themselves.

You do not need an internet connection to scan the code, which is an advantage. I imagine this is why they’ve included a check and why the code is so large.

It’s worked first time whenever someone I’ve been with has scanned it.

It seems crazy that they are using JSON in a QR code. There are much more compact encodings they could have chosen.

AFAIK in my jurisdiction the QR codes are a simple number, which the app reports along with the names of the people who have checked in or you are checking in. The number represents all the data that UK code is trying to convey. Not sure why the UK code needs all of that within itself rather than having a lookup table of some sort the number points to.

Damn, you should make a new post for this article if it hasn't been posted yet

Part of the problem is that the mainstream media - including the BBC - seem to have mislead people about how well contact tracing worked in places like South Korea. For example, they ran an article a few months back about how it was so effective that South Korea could reopen their pubs and nightclubs. In reality, they'd tried doing that multiple times and every time, cases had started going up enough that they had to close them again - but you wouldn't know that from the article. Nor would you have known that the same thing happened that time; the BBC kept on completely ignoring the rise in cases there even as they reported less important stories from South Korea.

Covid still isn't in control in South Korea. (Singapore maybe, but that relied on their society being structured in a way that wouldn't be politically acceptable elsewhere. If you take a look at the infection rate in their worker dorms, and realise those people would be living amongst the rest of the community in equally crowded housing and shopping at the same stores in Western countries - just like they were in Singapore until they were forced into dorms so actual citizens didn't have to look at them - and that those infections weren't even counted as "community cases" there...)

China also shows that these apps (which combine track and trace, with status) are very useful to re-open the economy after lockdowns in a way that helps contain further outbreaks.

Of course, saying "it seems to work in China" is the surest way to having a course of action shot down as unacceptable whatever its actual merits...

There's a lot of misleading information flying around about how much the app costs.

The budget for the overall NHS Test and Trace system was £37bn last time I checked, and lots of news outlets seem to be trying to conflate that budget with either the cost of the tracing system (which didn't work very well) or the cost of the app. In reality, the vast majority of the spend has been on testing, and some of that budget likely remains unspent.

The entire Test & Trace costed about 37 billion (at the latest estimate) and ministers admitted it has only a marginal impact on limiting spread:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/19/covid-19-test-and-trace...