After spending millions and millions of pounds on the development of its own COVID-19 contact tracing app, Britain has decided to abandon its own attempts due to serious technical failures and turn to the development framework of giants Apple and Google. Croatia was much wiser and opted for that development framework right from the start.
According to information from The Guardian, the expert community reportedly warned the British government multiple times that the project of developing its own type of app could not succeed in the way it was envisioned. Recall that contact tracing apps for coronavirus work on the principle of Bluetooth technology and digital keys and serve to inform individuals about the recommendation for self-isolation if they have been in close contact with an infected person. The main disputes regarding the use of these apps primarily concerned privacy rights in centralized systems or the collection of such information in one place, data protection, and ensuring anonymity.
Due to extensive considerations and regulation of information security while maintaining functionality, the model of decentralized data collection architecture has proven successful in that all data is stored locally on users’ mobile devices, and privacy is ensured through pseudonymization with actively changing digital keys. What has not been overly publicized is the actual „usefulness of the app“ given the objective challenge aimed at the minimal number of users who must actively use it for such a notification system to be meaningful.
In simple terms, if you find yourself in a tighter movement perimeter with, for example, ten people in a place and only four of you use the contact tracing app, and one of the other six who do not use it is infected – you will not be notified about it because your phone did not record them at the moment of contact within the given perimeter. Likewise, if you are running in Jarun and someone next to you sneezes, and it later turns out that they are infected with the coronavirus, if neither of you uses the app – you will not be notified of contact with the infected person. Various studies indicate that between 70% and 85% of citizens should use the app for such a system to be „useful“, but even in Germany, the surveyed interest of citizens in it does not exceed 45% so far.
The British app with a centralized data collection system failed on what seems to be a simple technical aspect. Namely, due to different settings of operating systems on mobile devices (both factory and user-related) concerning, for example, battery saving and data traffic, it turned out that the app recognized only 4% of Apple users who installed it and 75% of Google Android users. The app itself, due to frequent settings on the mobile device, automatically switches to „sleep mode“ when there are no specific activities (sleep when idle), and the Bluetooth signal from another user who enters the designated distance perimeter fails to wake it up. And thus, millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money went down the drain.
Although the British tried to dispute the Google-Apple model with statements that it cannot accurately measure the distance between mobile devices or „contacts“ and thus justify the huge investment in developing their own app, their government decided to embrace it due to this fiasco and fully rely on its framework in terms of information security and privacy protection.
