UK Virus-Tracing App Switches To Apple-Google Model (bbc.com) 34
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: In a major U-turn, the UK is ditching the way its current coronavirus-tracing app works and shifting to a model based on technology provided by Apple and Google. The Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-focused. However, it means epidemiologists will have access to less data. The government now intends to launch an app in the autumn, however it says the product may not involve contact tracing at that point. Instead the software may be limited to enabling users to report their symptoms and order a test.
Baroness Dido Harding -- who heads up the wider Test and Trace program -- will only give the green light to actually deploying the Apple-Google technology if she judges it to be fit for purpose, which she does not believe is the case at present. It is possible this may never happen. Germany, Italy and Denmark are among other countries to have switched from a so-called "centralized" approach to a "decentralized" one. The centralized version trialled on the Isle of Wight worked well at assessing the distance between two users, but was poor at recognizing Apple's iPhones. Specifically, the software registered about 75% of nearby Android handsets but only 4% of iPhones. By contrast, the Apple-Google model logged 99% of both Android mobiles and iPhones.
Baroness Dido Harding -- who heads up the wider Test and Trace program -- will only give the green light to actually deploying the Apple-Google technology if she judges it to be fit for purpose, which she does not believe is the case at present. It is possible this may never happen. Germany, Italy and Denmark are among other countries to have switched from a so-called "centralized" approach to a "decentralized" one. The centralized version trialled on the Isle of Wight worked well at assessing the distance between two users, but was poor at recognizing Apple's iPhones. Specifically, the software registered about 75% of nearby Android handsets but only 4% of iPhones. By contrast, the Apple-Google model logged 99% of both Android mobiles and iPhones.
You're sort of right to call it. (Score:4, Informative)
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Readers outside the UK won't have seen repeated efforts by the company creating it to explain how they were working successfully around the limitations posed by both Android and IOS. Dropping hints they were hacking it, mentioning GHCQ to further the idea of working hacks.
Took a month or so of repeat publicity from the tech industry of the problems before they embarked on a campaign of lying about progress. Anything to keep the funding flowing as long as possible. Aided by a PM who never knowingly tells the
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Yes, it detects 99% of phones, but not necessarily at the correct distance. That's what they said yesterday.
Dr Apple and Dr Google (Score:3, Interesting)
What the fuck happened to medical privacy laws, now you must report your symptoms to Google and they then issue you instructions on what you will do and where you will go. Wow that's fascism combination of Corporations and State controlling citizens. It was always held that UK would be likely to go that way, the monarchy, the house of lords, all desperate to retain power and privilege and aligning with the corporations to seize it. Seriously report your symptoms to a doctor, not some privacy invasive shit head corporations. They are not entitled to that data, there are laws meant to protect the people's medical history and having to report your medical symptoms to private for profit tech firms to rent out that data, is sick as.
Those new Huawei phones sans Google, sans M$ and even sans Apple are sounding really good now, it's not like the Chinese government can do anything with the data they mine off my phone. The poms have gone mad. I think they are in a real panic over the brexit crisis on top of covid 19 and the borrowed and sold gold (most would call that stealing). The UK economy is going to crash and crash hard.
The UK Labour party was lucky they did not win the election, now they will get to clean up the mess. The Tories were locked out of the Brexit solution because it would have hurt the poor blighters too much to accept the source of the solution and now the Tories are well and truly stuck with a economy about to be well and truly devastated, their own idiot doing.
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Re:Dr Apple and Dr Google (Score:5, Informative)
What the fuck happened to medical privacy laws, now you must report your symptoms to Google and they then issue you instructions on what you will do and where you will go.
Rubbish. Read up a little on how the proposed system works. Also, isn't participation and/or reporting your symptoms on a voluntary basis in the UK? It is in many of the other countries in Europe. And that's fine too: the point is not to catch every single sick person, but to reduce the overall infection rate enough to keep the health care system able to cope while more restrictions are lifted. The biggest worry about these apps is that not enough people will participate voluntarily. The public is abosultely right to worry about privacy, to demand apps that respect people's privacy to the maximum extent possible, and demand very strict overight on what data is being collected and ironclad rules on how that is used. So inform them about risks and actual issues, don't spread FUD and misinformation like this.
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Re: Dr Apple and Dr Google (Score:3)
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Plus there's plenty of people in their 70s with smartphones. This is 2020. People in their 80s and 90s, not so much, but as folks get that old, they aren't moving around so much in the first place, so they have fewer exposures.
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They were talking about "having to" make cooperation with track and trace mandatory because so many people were refusing. Trust in the government is at an all time low, being both made up of habitual liars and having completely botched the COVID-19 response.
Even if the new app launches one day I'll have to carefully evaluate it before installing it. The main reason to do so will be to enable international travel, assuming they don't botch that aspect of it too.
Re:Dr Apple and Dr Google (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair to the OP, the original app was more than a little shady. I mean, what on earth were they doing letting Palantir get anywhere near everyone's health and location data? I wouldn't have touched the original app with a barge pole on that basis alone.
At least with Apple and Google I know people who work there, and if they were really lying about what the app was doing, it's hard to see how that information would not be leaked out. On the other hand Palantir's whole business model is collecting data and they weren't even hiding this - just relying on people's ignorance and covid mania to allow them to slurp up even more private information from the proles.
Everyone saw it coming (Score:5, Informative)
They planned to use battery-eating bluetooth to find other phones. Because bluetooth eats your battery, Apple allows it only when the app is running, so the app has to run in the foreground permanently to work. Next they thought since they are collecting data, they might as well collect your location data, which apart from violating your privacy, empties the battery even more. Then they continuously sent that data to their servers to keep it for 20 years, which again drains the battery. So this was never going to work, and because all the privacy violations, Apple would have never accepted it.
Meanwhile Apple and Google developed an API that does exactly what you want to fight the virus, and nothing else: It uses low power bluetooth to find nearby phones. Low power bluetooth can run all day without affecting your battery. And the app can be backgrounded where it uses no power. What data is collected? When two phones meet, they exchange a random key that changes every 10 minutes. So even if someone managed to extract all data from your phone, they wouldn't know which phone was nearby, they wouldn't even know that the same phone was nearby for more than ten minutes. All the information stays on your phone, and all information older than 14 days is deleted.
Now if you get the bad news that you caught the virus, you want to tell everyone who was near you. (You don't want to tell everyone? F***ing asshole, you deserve being punched in the face hard and often). So you tell the app you are infected. Then it uploads the codes of all the phones that you detected to a server. Note that nobody knows who these codes belong to, except the single phone in question would know. On the other hand, every phone downloads that list once a day. If it's on the list, it tells the user, so they know they were near someone infected and therefore at risk, and they then isolate for 14 days. (You don't want to isolate yourself when you were close to someone infected? F***ing asshole, you deserve to be punched in the face hard and often).
So the total effect is that no data that can identify either you or your phone is ever sent anywhere.
Italy, Germany, Canada, several US states and many others are using this API. Why didn't the UK government use it? Because they gave a 250 million pound deal to the brother of Dominic Cummings best mate.
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It was actually a bit more clever than that. Even when an app is sleeping it can receive certain Bluetooth messages. Apple implemented that so that iBeacons, basically little Bluetooth Low Energy transmitters that retailers can use to spam your phone, work even when your phone is "asleep" in your pocket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What the app can't do is transmit. So they rely on Android devices nearby producing the iBeacon messages, causing the iPhone to wake the app up when one is received. If both
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It uses low power bluetooth to find nearby phones. Low power bluetooth can run all day without affecting your battery. And the app can be backgrounded where it uses no power.
Well... For about 2 weeks, I have been using the corresponding Swiss application, also based on the Google/Apple API : it eats about 5% of my battery capacity, which I find acceptable for the service it provides.
But I fully agree with the rest of your post.
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So you tell the app you are infected. Then it uploads the codes of all the phones that you detected to a server.
That isn't correct. It's actually much more private than that.
It uploads your random codes from the last two weeks to the server, not the codes of everyone you saw. Everyone else's phones ask daily for the most recent codes and then check on-device whether those codes match with any they saw. The privacy benefits to doing it this way are significant. Because you generate codes once every 10 minutes like clockwork, the central server can't infer anything about your activities. It has no idea how many people
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Almost like Apple and Google designed and planned it that way.
Which is the entire point. And for more privacy, what is uploaded isn't the actual IDs used, but hashes of them (or rather mathematical transformations - like "sum of digits is equal to 378" so you don't even have an ID. The phones then calculate the transformations to determine if they match. So the actual list of infected people can't actually be traced to a specific ph
Failing Upwards (Score:5, Insightful)
The UKs response to coronavirus has been an object lesson in incompetence in which every single aspect of their management has been an embarrassing shambles. They've had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward constructive choices after exhausting every other bad option under the guise of following the science. It's an absolute disaster, of which, this debacle is just the latest.
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Regarding falling upwards it's important to remember a simple fact of life, the vast majority of people in the world will remember your name but not remember why they know it. It's the human equivalence of no such thing as bad press.
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We have another 4 years of this to go and brexit about to hit.
The UK can't survive this Tory government. Scotland will leave, Northern Ireland will probably leave, and Johnson will be the first Prime Minister of England & Wales.
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Regardless of her specifically, I think regardless of whether you support Tories, Labour, Libdem or others, it's hard not to agree that the government as a whole is an utter shit show. The Conservatives might be in power, but they're bumbling from one disaster to the next. Labour offer no meaningful opposition, much less any representation of alternative view points. The libdems are struggling to get any sort of voice on any sort of topic and along with "others" are too small to really do anything of use.
Al
The mind boggles (Score:2)
Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-focused.
"Promoted" is right. Because if there's one sure thing in this world, it's that "Google" and "privacy" can only be found in sentences stating how the former tramples on the latter.
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Since you have the phone already assume Google/Apple already can know whatever they want already and so telling them this as well is no issue
Telling a private company with a government contract was always the issue
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The privacy problem was requiring your postcode, email & consent to hold, use & sell your app generated data for 20 years to use it. The shady politicians and businesses on both sides of the deal just guaranteed any abuse that could happen was intended to happen.
Google+Apple derailed the abuse and any price was worth paying (lost lives included) to bypass them. Be happy they failed to make it work.