UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal Britain is sleepwalking into another coronavirus blunder by failing to listen to global consensus and expert analysis with the release of the NHS COVID-19 contact-tracking app. On Monday, the UK government explained in depth and in clearly written language how its iOS and Android smartphone application – undergoing trials in …
This is getting like the intro and the outro by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band
Crapita has (finally) fallen out of favour with the government. They've not been included on the recent approved contractor lists and a lot of their old contracts are now being picked up on renewal by the other large consultancy firms (IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, CGI etc) or these new 'weirdo' firms (Cummings phrase not mine).
"I think it’s safe to say most of the working population have a smartphone "
Not sure why you would think that (no supporting evidence provided)- you could of course be right.... by accident.
Just having a smartphone doesn't neccesarily mean 'an up to date, working, regularly used' smartphone.
A small sample from my immediate workplace. 25 people. 4 don't have a smartphone. From the much larger wider organisation I think that's about average. Of the 21 with smartphones i would class another 3 as 'have one but hardly use'. We know this stuff because we had to sort out 2FA for all staff...
I have a quite old smartphone, finally decided to replace the battery, which has made a big difference. But it's Android. At least Google have promised their app will work on it. Even with a brand new, stock, battery, I'm not sure it could run the NHS app all day. I'm a little bit puzzled by the current jargon. The labels for the different power states seem to have changed. Most of the time I carry it, the screen is off, it's waiting at its lowest power setting for a call because it is, you know, a phone. That's what phones do.
I'm wondering what these brilliant programmers are doing with their phones when they're gallivanting around. Hunting Pokemon?
"I think it’s safe to say most of the working population have a smartphone "
Not sure why you would think that (no supporting evidence provided)- you could of course be right.... by accident.
A quick trip to Wikipedia suggests the UK has the highest smart phone penetration in the world - 82% in 2018.
"I think it’s safe to say most of the working population have a smartphone"
I think it's safe to say that isn't an answer to my questions. I was obviously referring to people who do not have such a phone. Incomplete data in this case could easily be far, far worse than having no data at all.
"I think it’s safe to say most of the working population have a smartphone"
Apparently it's generally reckoned that fewer of us in the more vulnerable older age group don't. I'm not convinced of this but SWMBO doesn't and if push came to shove with this one I could always revert to my old moderately aware but not really smart phone even if both of its batteries are shot.
Might be slightly out of date but yesterday I was reading up.
About 79% of the population (not just working people).
100% of 16-24
going down to around 40% of over-65s.
Also, add in those who spend a lot of time in phone signal not-spots. At the very least that is likely to delay information transfer, possibly significantly.
"They set up the USGS earthquake early warning system for you."
They did? Where? I've never seen it in operation.
If you mean that thing that Newsom was babbling about last year, it's strictly in Alpha Test ... and even when fully operational, I seriously doubt it'll really do anyone any good. (SpeakTyping as a guy who has been a consultant to the USGS for several decades.) Besides, the end-user app only runs on iOS and Android, neither of which I am willing to spend money on. So no, it's not built for me.
When I was at SAIL, we had several seismographs wired to send an alarm (sonalerts in all participants living quarters, ~100 participants) at the first sign of fairly low-level P-waves. After a year or so, not a single one of us managed to get out of the house before the S-waves got there. Needless to say, the project was dropped as useless. Now, decades later, it's my tax dollars at work. Gee, thanks. I'm sure I'll sleep ever so much easier.
Those that do have a smartphone and run apps can run this one. Those that don't, won't. Just because this app won't reach 100% of the population doesn't mean we shouldn't bother with it at all (privacy issues aside)
I think that you are basically assuming that the percentage who do/are able to download and use the app are a random sample from the population as a whole in a particular district (I gather the idea is to modulate lockdown/restrictions in specific areas). If that assumption is correct then yes, a percentage will be enough.
However if there is any systematic difference between the set of people who download and successfully use the app and those that don't, then the decisions generated could be less than optimum in an area. You would not know about the mis-match between the data generated from the application and reality for the incubation period + symptoms worsening period, so say 14 to 21 days. If the R from app was 1.05 and the real R was 1.5 (say) that could be a very significant issue
The people who download it will be heavily skewed towards those who haven't left the house in weeks, because they're convinced the world is ending.,
The ones who won't download it are those who are going out and about, taking sensible precautions.
The results are not going to be particularly useful.
"... people who don't have a cell phone addiction, and so don't really see a need to carry one everywhere ..."
You are talking about people with a cell phone addiction, who have to use it everywhere. Many people just want to be reachable wherever they are, and have a mobile phone in their pocket. I carry mine around with me all the time, but not using it. Most people have a phone with them all the time.
Now of course after reading the article it seems that with Apple/Google's solution this will work if two people with their phones in their pockets walk past each other, while the NHS solution only works if both have _active_ phones and both have no other app in the foreground. So if one of the two reads theregister, or one of the two is on Netflix or iPlayer, or one of the two just has the phone in his pocket doing nothing, then the NHS app doesn't work,
"I carry mine around with me all the time, but not using it."
Try leaving it at home for a week. Should be easy, because you claim you don't use it. Note your reactions to it not being there. I'll bet you start feeling anxious, irritable, worried, angry, craving, and many other classic signs of withdrawal ...
At the end of the day, I grew up with constant comms and a pocket terminal being the ideal (Thunderbird, Star Trek, and thousands of sci-fi books), and being out of comms being the beginning of disaster. I carry my phone (actually, two!) everywhere because that is how I feel comfortable, especially knowing that I can call for help given some of my health problems. The major caveats are that a) I didn't succumb to owning one until there was a specific need, and b) because I don't like disturbing people, the ringer is turned off almost all the time anyway.
The age distribution of those prepared/able to download and run the app will be skewed away from those most at risk from infection because of the need for an Apple/Android device as mentioned or implied above. This means that the decisions based on the data may not actually be those needed to minimise infection in a given region. (That would be an issue with the Google/Apple api based system as well tbf)
The lack of compatibility between the UK based NHS application and the Rest Of The World Except Australia and Possibly India system may have issues for mutual travel arrangements going forward especially if the UK system is missing a significant number of interactions
And finally, if the system really does miss significant interactions, the data generated will be obviously divorced from the true infection rate in a given postcode - as will become apparent some weeks later (infection/symptom time lag) for each degree of separation in a local graph
Have I missed anything?
Coat: mine's the one with an ancient Blackberry which I may decide to replace with a landfil android if this app looks like it might actually generate useful public health action
UK finds itself almost alone
Well, that "almost" covers a pretty wide range!
"that other nations have decided to adopt." is also an interestingly vague phrase. The article seems to make out that Britain is alone in choosing a centralized tracking app that the government can abuse, while all other right-thinking nations have stood up for personal liberty.
It isn't that simple. France, for example, is also sticking with the EU-recommended centralized PEPP-PT model (and privacy organizations like the CNIL are complaining). Norway has a centralized model, while Germany Austria, Estonia and Switzerland have chosen the decentralized DP-3T one. Other nations have chosen other approaches. Privacy International has some figures and articles which are a little less shouty.
>Norway has a centralized model:
Currently Norway is under a state of emergency, where the goverment has taken control of the parlament (Stortinget). This app is a good example of this. It was given to a governmental owned consulting firm Simula without any competition (£4mill, around 30% of their total yearly budget). It is a very simple app just collect movement data and drain the battery and deliver it to a central mainframe for data-science digging. But the GDPR part is sketchy and many security analysts recommend not installing it, the police wont use it and it is voluntarily: So just another pointless action by the government to show decisive action in their finest hour:
https://www.newsinenglish.no/2020/04/17/debate-flies-over-virus-tracking-app/
That sounds like sarcasm, which I endorse. Nothing like a bit of snark towards Brexit while he was at it.
I'll suspend judgement on the app until I see some independent analysis of its operation. It might be a technical failure, in which case it'll be useless and all the paranoid ranting will have been for nothing. If it does work reasonably like it's supposed to then the key to acceptance is going to be the political & legal constraints on its use. Personally I would like to see a solid legal control excluding mission-creep with infractors, including ministers, going to jail. But sadly I can't see that happening, and a lot of commenters here wouldn't trust it anyway.
> solid legal controls ... a lot of commenters here wouldn't trust it anyway.
For the good and sufficient reason that "solid legal controls" is a contradiction in terms. Parliament can, has, does, and will change "solid legal controls" around citizens' rights any time that it wants to. I give you RIPA as a single instance.
If you have the app on your phone, and you report that you have fallen ill with something like Covid, then all the fleeting contacts that the app has harvested will be given "NHS advice" - an injunction by their android overlord, doubtless soon to be enforced punitively, to lock themselves away for a week. They won't be given tests for them to see if they have actually caught Covid, because we're British and can't do that sort of thing.
So, what is to stop some joker putting the app on a burner phone, adding in a junk postcode, and collecting as many contacts as they can? They can do this, for example, by leaving the phone in some busy area in their employer's khazi or canteen. I am sure with imagination and industry someone could easily harvest 100 contacts a day. Or they can target it very specifically at people they don't like. Then, after a week of this fun, they can collect their reward by pressing the big red nuclear lockdown button. It's a burner phone, so it won't affect them personally of course.
100? - think thousands - if you leave the phone in a factory canteen. Nice to have a couple of weeks quarentine as the weather gets better.
You dont have to even use a burner. You self report so you, could claim to have a sniffle and a temperature, and it appears that would be enough. Sit the phone by the door or the till of the canteen for half an hour and everyone going through is wiped out.
Or put a burner beside a rivals office/home or whatever and they get a call after the button has been pressed
It wouldnt even be illegal, currently, as far as I can see.
Immediately after they're infected, people can be wandering around, with no symptoms yet, highly infectious, spreading COVID-19 everywhere.
To stop that, you need to tell potentially-infected contacts to self isolate immediately. You can't wait a couple of days for a test to be performed and the result to come back.
And we're British, so normal people don't get COVID-19 tests anyway, unless you get so sick that you get sent to hospital. And we certainly can't do rapid testing. Sigh.
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