A Department for Health and Social Care spokesperson didn’t comment on the specific details. Instead, they reiterated the goal of supporting the NHS Test and Trace service.

The extras would come alongside a possible new “PPE in your pocket” marketing scheme, and would underscore the challenges the UK faces. Widescale adoption of the contact tracing app may be important to preventing infection spikes that lead to further lockdowns, but there’s no guarantee a wary public will download it. Singapore has considered smart bracelets after struggling to recruit users for its app — the UK might not fare much better if residents see few immediate benefits.

Speaking to the Observer, Professor Tim Spector said his app was treated as “the enemy” by NHSX. “We were hampered from the beginning, in March when we first contacted NHSX,” he said. “Lots of signals went to places like the universities, my university, the medical charities and the royal colleges not to back our app because that would interfere with their one.”

Spector also said that many people in the NHS wanted to work with the King’s College team, but had quietly advised him that everything would have to go through NHSX. “We naively thought they would sort of take our app over or incorporate them into one,” he said. “The whole point was to help the NHS, to find the hotspots so they could get the resources to the right hospitals.”

However, it is worth noting that Apple and Google’s framework comes with a host of restrictions regulating exactly who can use the technology and subsequently publish apps arising from it, so these alternate apps would have faced intense scrutiny were they to be launched officially. Nonetheless, the Covid Symptom Study app and others could still form part of an “early warning system” in the event of a second wave of COVID-19. Given that the new contact-tracing app has no firm deadline for launch, data from these sources will prove invaluable in monitoring the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, the chastened NHSX has set up “Project Oasis,” which will gather important data from eight existing tracking apps. As The Guardian reports, one unnamed tech firm said this is a strong example of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

As previously reported, the UK will break from the Apple-Google “decentralized” approach. Instead, the NHS’s technology group NHSX chose a centralized model, in which a list of contacts made via Bluetooth signals will be stored on users’ devices as anonymous tokens. If a user has symptoms or tests positive, the contacts can be submitted to the app, which analyzes the data and sends notifications if necessary.

While critics say the centralized approach raises privacy concerns, NHSX CEO Matthew Gould told Reuters that the group “put privacy right at the heart” of the app. He explained that the app doesn’t know who users are, where they are or who they’ve been near. Britain’s Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham pointed out that the centralized approach will allow the UK to gather more insights into the virus, something a decentralized approach might limit.

Just yesterday, France announced that it will begin testing its COVID-19 tracking app beginning May 11th, and Australia has already launched its own version. In the US, a group of senators is working on a bill that would set requirements for data collection and transparency in COVID-19 tracking apps, and Apple and Google have outlined how public health authorities around the world can use their upcoming tracking system to preserve user privacy.

SOPA Images via Getty Images

Twitter has seen a 24 percent jump in its daily users since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, 166 million users in total. Because apparently we aren’t all collectively miserable enough as it is without it.

British Museum

Following the Smithsonian’s image release in February, the British Museum posted pictures of 4.5 million pieces in its collection online this week, nearly 300,000 of which have never been shown to the public. It’s a feel-good gesture in these uncertain times, so long as you ignore just where and how the British got all this stuff.

Engadget

While they may not have sufficient supplies of PPE, workers for the UK’s National Health Service have access to more games than they could play in a lifetime thanks to the Games for Carers program. Because our priorities have to lie somewhere.

Engadget

With commutes a thing of the past, the number of people accessing Spotify from their homes instead of their cars has jumped 50 percent. And boy howdy do people like listening to podcasts on there. There are now more than a million podcasts available if you’re looking for something to listen to while you clean your apartment for the fourth time this week.

Another potential drawback, is that the centralized approach may eat up more power. Apple’s solution lets the contact tracing happen in the background, but the UK’s app has to be woken up every time the device detects another nearby device running the same software, BBC explains.

By choosing the centralized approach, the NHS is aligning more with Australia than some of its EU counterparts. Australia’s app, which was released over the weekend, uses a mix of Bluetooth and stored contact data on both the app and servers. Germany, on the other hand, has switched its stance and is now pursuing a decentralized architecture, as are Austria, Estonia and Switzerland.

So far, the European Commission and the EU’s data protection watchdog support both models but note that the differences aren’t entirely clear, EUobserver reports. In either case, the challenge will be getting enough widespread adoption for the apps to be effective.

Plus, I think everyone sucks at security and few things are as bad as app security. I know this can be done right. I understand the security, privacy and cultural constraints of how to make a contact tracing app successful while not trampling our human rights. But does anyone pushing us to the inevitability of contact tracing apps get it?

That said, contact tracing apps are not just unavoidable; we desperately need them. They’re already in use in different countries, yet implementation is slow for Western countries. Basically, we’re next.

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— Arte y Anarquía (@ArteYAnarquia) April 22, 2020

Contact tracing is when health workers stem the spread of a disease by locating an infected person, documenting where they went and with whom they came into contact then finding out if those people have symptoms, and determining potential testing and quarantine. It has been used all over the world when fighting contagious infectious diseases like Ebola. Right now, contact tracing with quarantines and widespread, accurate testing are absolutely vital in stopping the COVID-19 pandemic.

The phrase “contact tracing” as we know it online has become a catch-all for digital alternatives, such as apps that reduce risk time, minimize everyone’s exposure and save lives.

It could also save a lot of money; our economy is bleeding out before our eyes. But it’s also not cheap to implement. “Contact tracing on a national level could cost in the billions of dollars and require hiring more than 100,000 people,” NBC News reported. 

“Every clinician in the city who cares for someone with COVID-19 and every laboratory that processes a positive test must report the case to the Department of Public Health, which is how San Francisco is building out its database of contacts,” NBC further explained. The implementation of contact tracing is labor- and time-consuming:

San Francisco plans to use a workforce of 140 people, including medical students from the University of California, San Francisco, librarians and staff from the city attorney’s office, to go through lists of people who have tested positive for the virus and interview them.

While SF gears up for at least 140 people for its 883,000 citizens, on Wednesday California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state is readying to train up to 10,000 contact tracers. 

San Francisco’s health department is employing the use of software for its contact tracing, though that software is used by the tracers themselves to track and monitor people’s cases. It’s not being forced on the city’s population. On Monday SF’s public health director, Dr. Grant Colfax, told press that “participation in contact tracing is voluntary and no one will be asked about their immigration status or for their Social Security number or bank details.”

That’s reassuring from a privacy and anti-surveillance perspective, which is the aspect filling so many of us with crushing dread. Make no mistake, we’re talking about an event — the coronavirus pandemic — creating an opportunity for a worldwide digital security and privacy apocalypse. We can be sure that the dictators and data dealers are all salivating over all that Big Brother brand toothpaste that can never be put back in the tube.

That’s probably what brought the DP-3T Project, a group of digital security and privacy professionals, to publish an astonishingly comprehensive report this week: The Privacy and Security Risk Evaluation of Digital Proximity Tracing Systems. In it, they plainly explain that all contact tracing apps use Bluetooth to estimate proximity between two phones, and all the system needs to do is inform the phone’s owner they’ve been near an infected person. “The system does not need to reveal to anyone who the potential contagious contact was with, or when and where it happened.”

The report goes on to list risks everyone will need to know about. That includes the potential for app makers to abuse all the data (including access to people’s social graphs), that in all Bluetooth tracing systems “a powerful antenna can trigger false alerts,” adversaries could track users, and more.

The thing is, in order for contact tracing apps to work, they must be universally adopted by everyone. It would help enormously if makers of these apps addressed the concerns and risks in DP-3T Project’s paper. Because contact tracing apps are working in some places, but not others, and it all comes down to voluntary adoption.

Everyone’s doing it… differently

Contact-tracing smartphone apps are already in use by countries including China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan — all with varying results. Australia and the UK’s NHS plan to, and so do EU member states, which is why the European Commission (EC) just published guidelines for EU app devs.

The US is also interested; different states are pursuing their own solutions, with around 20 different state and local governments interested in using MIT’s open source “Privacy by Design” Private Kit. New York announced his week it will launch its own tri-state virus tracing program (with a huge cash infusion from Michael Bloomberg).

Then there’s Google and Apple’s unholy alliance; the companies are building APIs -— the actual contact tracing phone apps will come from public health orgs. The tech giants are calling it “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing,” and they already hit a few snags with the UK’s NHS.

“Apple and Google are encouraging health services worldwide to build contact-tracing apps that operate in a decentralised way, allowing individuals to know when they’ve been in contact with an infected person but preventing governments from using that data to build a picture of population movements in aggregate,” reported press.

“But the policies, unveiled last week, apply only to apps that don’t result in the creation of a centralised database of contacts,” Guardian explained. “That means that if the NHS goes ahead with its original plans, its app would face severe limitations on its operation.”

Meanwhile the US federal government chose Peter Thiel and Palantir to create the HHS Protect Now “single source” COVID-19 data tracking platform. Protect Now integrates 187 Palantir data sources, which according to press includes “hospital capacity and inventories, supply chain data from the government and industry, diagnostic and geographic testing data.” A government spokesperson told Daily Beast HHS was also relying on “private sector partner contributions of data.” Yeah, because seamless data sharing between government and private companies always ends well.

“Palantir has already done work for the Trump administration, providing profiling tools to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of the president’s draconian border crackdown,” Vanity Fair reminds us. “And then there’s Thiel’s personal links to Trump. An early Facebook investor and board member, Thiel joined Trump and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a private dinner last year at the White House and he reportedly influenced the social media giant’s policy on political ads.”

The point is, it’s convenient for companies to argue that all the Hoovering of our data they’ve done over the past 10-15 years could make them uniquely positioned to ride in on a big, white syphilitic unicorn and save us. (We’d just need to surrender to a deeper surveillance state while a seamless data sharing deal is made between the private sector and the government.)

Except it won’t save us, at least according to a white paper from the ACLU Turns out, COVID-19 is a very unique situation.

“We have spoken with engineers and executives at a number of the largest US companies that hold location data on Americans’ movements and locations and generally they have told us that their data is not suitable for determining who was in contact with whom for purposes of Covid-19,” ACLU concluded in its April 8 paper, The Limits of Location Tracking in an Epidemic.

Implementation vs. adoption

But wait: let’s back up to the part where I mentioned all the different countries around the world that are already using contact tracing apps with varying degrees of success. On the one hand we’ve got China and Israel going full police state with invasive citizen surveillance, while countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan have balanced privacy and virus tracing.

“Top of mind has been whether authoritarian regimes have an edge over democracies, because they can mandate top-down measures like lockdowns and digital tracking of infected people’s movements and contacts,” wrote Harvard Business Review. But “the top and bottom performers in Covid-19 containment span the spectrum from autocratic to democratic. It’s true that China is effectively flattening the curve, but so is South Korea, a vibrant democracy. Other democracies — the U.S., Spain, Italy, and France, are faring less well.”

It’s no coincidence that the locations seeing success with contact tracing smartphone apps have at least two things in common: governments behind the apps are tech-savvy, and the places they’re working are those with more collectivist societies — specifically, those in East Asia. Most of those tech-savvy governments emphasize controls on digital privacy (like South Korea and Singapore), easing issues of trust that might create avoidance.

In the US, states have been fractured by the federal government and the union is splintering. States are forming coalitions and fighting the federal government for citizens’ survival. A contact tracing app from the federal government will never gain universal adoption for more reasons than can be listed here.

That’s okay, they’d just screw it up anyway.

Digital contact tracing for COVID-19 is inevitable. Because this means mass installation of a surveillance app on everyone’s phones in order for it to work, it’s a moment when we can decide that fighting for survival means fighting for our future, too.

I hate this moment in so many ways, and for so many reasons. I hate that this should be the moment that all our privacy and security mistakes with apps, companies, and people’s lives are just staring us in the face, screaming for someone to pay attention. Because this should be the promise of all this stupid technology, that when we are dying and oppressed, that we could use it to find a way and toss everyone who abused apps and tech to harm us.

There should be a contact tracing app that I want to use, and that I can trust. Not another grubby shitshow of vulnerabilities and privacy violations made by people I hate and corporations trying to make sure I have no choice.

That contact tracing app would do exactly what it needs to do, and no more — just as described in The Privacy and Security Risk Evaluation of Digital Proximity Tracing Systems. And we’d use it as part of the things we incorporate to get through the next part of this game’s nightmare level, another tool for our arsenal of resilience, an acceptable accessory while we shift our perspective from preoccupation with fear and loss to focus on strength and resetting our worlds.

It would not sell us out, but instead help us survive and adapt — both COVID-19 and the murderous, anti-science, profiteers and grifters trying to deep-six our freedoms and futures. Turns out survival and adaptability are evolutionary traits — science! A definite advantage when your country’s idiot CEO is literally talking about blowing sunshine up your ass to cure the plague.

The pause comes after some reported drama surrounding Dyson’s late March announcement. Telegraph sources said that Dyson’s announcement had sparked “fury” in the Prime Minister’s office as it preempted plans to outline a strategy to boost the National Health Service’s capacity. Effectively, Dyson may have been “point-scoring” for publicity’s sake, promising a giant order even though it needed regulatory approval to move forward.

As Dyson said, this doesn’t mean CoVent is gone. Countries hit harder by COVID-19, such as the US, might still need it. And a lack of demand is clearly a good thing at a time when many are still worried that hospitals could be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. However, the decision to put manufacturing on hold may hurt Dyson’s reputation. This comes just months after company scrapped its electric car project in the fall — it’s not having much success outside of core categories like vacuum cleaners and hair dryers.

Apple and Google have said they’re working together on COVID-19 contact tracing, and that might just include collaboration with specific healthcare providers. The Times sources claim the two tech companies are working with the UK’s National Health Service on an app to trace people who’ve come close to those infected with the new coronavirus. Like the companies have publicly discussed, it would use Bluetooth to alert you about possible contact and urge you to get tested.

Ministers ordered the creation of the app, according to the tipsters. Combined with much wider testing, the feature would be key to lifting some of the strictest lockdown measures in late May.

Facebook’s support for the fight against COVID-19 now includes a simple but important addition: keeping people in touch. It’s partnering with the UK’s National Health Service to offer up to 2,050 free Portal video calling devices to the country’s hospitals, care homes, hospices and other medical settings. The hardware will help patients contact friends and family at a time when they can’t see each other in person.

About 50 Portals are already in use at pilot locations in Surrey, with London, Manchester and Newcastle cities coming soon. Wired shared leaked details on April 6th. While this will initially be useful only to locations with sufficient WiFi connections, the NHS is looking at options like LTE hotspots and cellular-equipped tablets to enable chats in areas where WiFi isn’t an option.

You can search for a condition like back pain or chickenpox, for instance, and read a short description for it, a list of symptoms and a list of possible treatments without having to click through to visit a website. Google says the Knowledge Panels will be available for over 250 conditions to start with, so the feature will presumably expand to cover even more.

The company uses Knowledge Panels to highlight results from reputable sources for various topics, like celebrities. Searching for a musician’s name will bring up Knowledge Panels with information about them and their work, as well as links to where you can hear their music and their videos. More recently, it started displaying Knowledge Panels for COVID-19 when you search for coronavirus, which contain details about the condition from the World Health Organization.