darkpaw

After initially rejecting the Apple-Google model for Exposure Notification, the National Health Service on Thursday said it had "agreed to join forces with Google and Apple, to bring the best bits of both systems together."

The NHS had reportedly been testing both its own proprietary system and one based on the Apple-Google API, but found problems with their own. Per the BBC, the NHS solution only detected 4% of nearby iPhones while logging 75% of close Android devices.

Apple's and Google's system, registered 99% of nearby Androids and iPhones, but had weaker distance calculations, the NHS said.

However, Apple said it is "difficult to understand" the distance issue claims from the NHS.

Apple also expressed surprise that the NHS was working on a new version...

This whole omnishambles is caused by the actions of NHSX, which is "a United Kingdom Government unit with responsibility for setting national policy and developing best practice for National Health Service (NHS) technology, digital and data, including data sharing and transparency." (Wikipedia)

The NHS has not been involved in this app; it was outsourced by the UK government to Pivotal VMWare.

Don't denigrate the NHS by claiming they had anything to do with this Matt Hancock-up.

Ummm, Facebook don't get access to the data from Face ID, so there's no problem with using it to secure Messenger.

This should probably have been done ages ago. Not sure why they need to test it out on a small number of users first. Don't they have an internal testing team who can test that it works before releasing it to everyone? What would make one person's phone different from another's, unless Facebook have written their app incredibly badly?

Also, anyone alarmed at governments ID'ing faces should probably not be putting photos of themselves on Facebook anyway.

WilliamM said:

This article from the BBC attempts to say that the Apple/Google API doesn't work very well either.

FTA:

Those responsible believe a further advantage of their centralised approach is that the data can be processed on the server involved, since it would be too taxing a task to be done on smartphones.

But part of their challenge is communicating this to Baroness Dido Harding - who heads up the wider Test and Trace programme - and 10 Downing Street itself.

A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment.

Don't they realise what can be done on a smartphone these days? I'm sure an iPhone and even an Android phone is capable of iterating over a couple of lists and looking for matches.

Ah yes, Baroness Dido Harding:
- Former chief executive of the TalkTalk Group which leaked personal and banking details of up to four million customers, cost them £60m and lost them 95,000 customers.
- Sits on the board of the Jockey Club, which decided to go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival in the middle of a pandemic where 250,000 people congregated together to watch horses race and to catch a disease spread by close contact with infected people.
- And if nepotism is your thing, wife of John Penrose, Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare.

A triple-whammy! She is unqualified for this role.

The spokesman declined to comment because the person who would craft a response wasn't back from another 60-mile round-trip after thinking his eyes were a bit dodgy and needing to pile his family into the car to see if he could drive 250 miles.

That was apparently due to disagreements about how data about exposure and contact data should be stored.

Yeah. The UK government want to store the data from this app for TWENTY YEARS! This is just one of many reasons this app is dead on arrival. They've lost the trust of the public, and they want to keep this data for far too long.

It would be nice if they'd pay a little attention to the Books app, too. It keeps forgetting that I was looking in my collection of Audiobooks, and puts me back on the "Reading Now" tab. I shouldn't have to keep tapping the Library tab, then the Audiobooks section, then scrolling down to where I was in the list. It can't be beyond the wit of man to just store what bit of an app we were last on. "UserDefaults" are there for a reason, and Apple should make use of them.