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The government will finally launch a mobile phone app on Thursday that people in England and Wales can use to establish whether they may have been exposed to the coronavirus.
The launch follows the ignominious scrapping of previous app despite months of development, although some features are being incorporated into the new design.
It comes after the NHS and the government seem to have recognized that to get an app to work on British smartphones, they had to work with the companies that provide the technology that powers them, and not against them.
A previous application was discarded after it had technical problems
What is different this time?
The new application will use a COVID-19 Exposure notification system that Apple and Google have incorporated into new versions of their mobile operating systems, iOS and Android.
Privacy has been a big focus for both companies, and before even downloading the new app, users will need to turn on the exposure notifications feature, but they can turn it off at any time.
If it is on, instead of sending data to a public health authority, the phone will use Bluetooth to retain a collection of protected IDs in the device that will remember all other phones that have been nearby.
The team developing the government-wide app and NHSX, the digital unit of the health service, have created an algorithm that they say can establish how great the risk that someone has contracted the virus is, based on the signals. Bluetooth.
Not everyone you come across will be considered a potential contact. Instead, your contact score will receive a weighting based on the distance between the phones and how long they were together.
Exposure notifications are alerts that people will receive when someone they have been close to for a significant amount of time, perhaps less than six feet on a long bus ride, tests positive for coronavirus.
If, after receiving an alert, a user is tested and discovers that they are also positive for COVID-19, they can voluntarily send an alert to the protected IDs stored in the device.
If these contacts recorded by the phone meet the limits set by the NHS algorithm, the app will instruct them to isolate themselves as well.
This type of functionality was planned for the previous app, but because the government had not complied with Apple and Google’s requirement to keep this data on the devices themselves, it had trouble recording potential exposures.
One of the other new features is a QR code system. Businesses, including pubs, restaurants, hair salons, and cinemas, are urged to make sure they have NHS QR code signs visible for customers to scan with the app and register.
QR codes are designed to help companies automate the new legal requirement to record customer contact details, along with those of staff and other visitors to the facility.
The companies themselves will continue to take customer details just as they have during the pandemic, but the app itself will help the user keep track of where they have been.
In this way, the app will help traditional manual contract trackers while allowing users to check for any symptoms and see if they need to isolate themselves.
The app will track anonymously who people have contacted
The app will have trouble earning people’s trust.
Analysis by Rowland Manthorpe, Technology Correspondent
For its second try at a contact tracing app, the UK government has introduced several new items, but the essential problems it faced the first time around have yet to go away.
Perhaps the most notable new element is contact tracing technology. While the first app was built in-house, this time it uses the toolkit provided by Google and Apple.
This has been implemented in many other countries, including Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland.
The results on its effectiveness are still few and far between, but there are no complaints about its privacy protections, so at least on that front, people should feel safe using it.
The app also has some new features, notably a QR code scanner for registering at the venues.
The government has changed the law in England to make it illegal for certain facilities not to display a QR code and collect people’s data, so this will become a big part of everyday life.
And this is where the problems come in: not technical ones, but trust and transparency.
As an anecdote, there are still real trust issues about this app; However, as the government has not published any data on its pilots, it is impossible to know if these have been exceeded.
Crucial elements of the app’s functionality, such as the decision to share test results with contacts or not, are completely voluntary. Earning their trust will be vital for this tool to work.
