Day: 4 May 2020

The Independent leads with the news that the NHS is about to pilot its new coronavirus detector app – known as the "NHSX app" – in the Isle of Wight. Matt Hancock is expected to announce at today's Downing Street press briefing that the 141,000 residents of the island will become the first people in the country to test the new homegrown app. But why has the NHS developed its own contact-tracing app rather than rely on the tried-and-tested approach developed by Apple and Google? According to this report in The Register, the British Government has rejected the Apple-Google approach because the US tech giants protect their users' privacy too well. The Apple-Google approach is a tracing programme that relies on users consenting to their phones being used for data collection without creating a hackable data pool. The NHS app, by contrast, automatically sends that information to a central database on state-owned servers that creates a honey-pot for identity thieves. Two concerns immediately spring to mind. First, if the app is being developed by the NHS, will it actually work? The NHS's efforts to develop its own computerised patient record system had to be abandoned in 2013 at a cost of nearly £10 billion to the taxpayer. Second, will the NHS be able to protect all the data it gathers? ...