(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement

2020-06-19 00:00:00

So it was hardly surprising that when UK ministers proposed a contact tracing smartphone app, NHS officials saw an opportunity to create a world-leading piece of technology.

But on Thursday the British government announced that it was ditching its original plan in favor of a much simpler backup option—drawing criticism and anger, and leaving many concerned about the prospect of contact tracing technology in general. What happened?

Big data, big ideas

Digital contact tracing—phone-to-phone notifications that can alert users of potential exposure to disease—is a new technology, and the usefulness of such apps to assist track-and-trace efforts is largely untested. But perhaps if the app could also collect information to help track the virus in other ways—looking for patterns in the way the disease spreads, identifying clusters, finding outbreaks early, or even adding demographic and other data—then its potential could be dramatically increased.

This is what motivated officials and developers within the NHS to advocate a centralized model for their app. They believed it could gather the information it had collected on contacts into a protected data store, with the potential to be de-anonymized so people could be alerted if they had come in contact with someone who presented coronavirus symptoms or had received a positive test result.

The centralized approach would allow much more data analysis than decentralized models, which give users exposure notifications but don’t allow officials nearly so much access to data. Those models—such as the one proposed by Google and Apple which is now being used by the NHS—are far less invasive to privacy. The hope is that those privacy protections increase trust in the app, leading more people to use it.

There were other factors that led the UK toward developing a centralized app: its limited testing apparatus and relatively small number of human contact tracers meant that the system might be quickly overwhelmed if it was alerted to every notification of a potential positive case—while a centralized model based on confirmed cases rather than suspected ones was more in line with capacity.

Meanwhile, officials were looking for glory (and even knighthoods), and ministers were focused on rolling out a “world-beating” app, rather than just a successful one, so that they could claim victory on the world stage. The momentum toward a centralized system became unstoppable—and the challenges of building one were largely brushed aside.

Technical trouble—and organizational chaos

Among the many technical obstacles has been the performance of Bluetooth. Nearly all contact tracing apps rely on a phone’s Bluetooth function to track who has been in proximity to whom. In theory, if it running constantly, this can be very accurate, providing reliable results without flooding the health-care system with false positives that could undermine confidence, necessitate thousands of extra tests, and force people to self-isolate needlessly. But in practice, getting accurate results is difficult, and improving their quality has required substantial extra work from app designers across the world.
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[1] URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/19/1004190/uk-covid-contact-tracing-app-fiasco/
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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