I’ve also received a request to participate.
To continue @clausy’s video analogy, I think the hope was that the NHSX app would give a better picture of interactions, although at the expense of some loss of privacy that was judged appropriate by NHSX. When the app was tested on the Isle of Wight it was however found this wasn’t the case as the Apple devices didn’t play nicely (if this is due to privacy, more aggressive power saving or poor vendor interoperability is unknown). IOS, as a closed platform, allows developers outside Apple to do very little to tackle that problem, though the Wired article says tricks were used to keep the app running in the background on iOS. The trials did also test the Google Apple solution, and found its range estimation was poorer however**.
The NHSX app is open source, the iOS and Android versions can be found here https://github.com/nhsx/.
What Apple and Google are providing is an API (https://blog.google/documents/55/Android_Contact_Tracing_API.pdf) and backend service, not necessarily the source behind it. You still need to build an app on top of that API (though that looks trivial to do), and are also limited by exactly what the API provides, noting it appears fairly high level - tweaks are not apparently available.
Politics aside, my view is that this is a perfectly valid technical approach, and conducting a real world trial will have gained valuable experience and data that will help with interpretation and modelling based on any future collected results. On the surface it does however look like the Google-Apple API gives very little data, unless there is some sort of enhanced government dashboard behind it. It could still be the case that NHSX sees little value to them coming from that API.
** I think they are using signal strength to estimate distance. This is inherently difficult to do with good accuracy due to a number of factors. Making more measurements could help improve estimation, but at the expense of battery life. NHSX, Google and Apple may put different values on the tradeoffs between accuracy and battery.
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Forest Hull you are clearly very knowledgable. Far more so than me. I am sorry that I expressed myself in such forthright terms. I find myself getting a bit hot under the collar about how all this has been managed on our side of the pond. I also feel that we are not being told the truth about a lot of it. An additional Friday evening glass of wine or two and I can easily start sounding off. I am going to really try and avoid posting anything inflammatory or controversial. It can all too easily spill over into arguments.
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There’s a great piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on it all here. For me, this sentence right at the end seems pretty key: “There is scant proof from anywhere around the world that smartphone apps using Bluetooth are an effective method of contact tracing.”
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That is indeed very good Jon. It also demonstrates what nonsense I talk for 99% of the time.
Ha no problem - I hope it was good wine 
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This is by design. Giving third party apps unfettered access to run in the background can cause serious issues with CPU / data usage (and thus, battery usage). Not to mention, privacy implications (apps that constantly track precise location can give their developers an unreasonable amount of highly sensitive personal data).
By placing reasonable restrictions on third party apps, Apple protects its users. And that’s a level of protection I choose knowingly. Phones are different from personal computers. They have finite runtime, affected heavily by CPU and IO usage, and their array of sensors present a large potential threat to privacy.
As for the closed/open argument - Several core parts of Android are also closed (and for good reason). There is little chance that the U.K. government would be able to contribute to the open parts of the Android code in order to implement centralised government surveillance.
If governments were able to make such changes to mobile phone operating systems, we’d very quickly be living in an Orwellian dystopia.
Contact tracing apps that zap your battery and weaken your privacy will not be popular, and I’m pleased the government is not being draconian and forcing us to use them.
I think if we step back and look at how much has been achieved in a very short time it is actually quite amazing.
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Latest update:
https://mailchi.mp/ae3936e14227/new-covid-cases-in-the-uk-fall-by-half-4842554?e=0f2d566a5f
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Interestingly, I found my iPhone already has some exposure tracking features installed (with your choice of third party app to send the notification)
Settings > Privacy > Health
As you’d expect from Apple, no personally identifying information is exchanged by their protocol.
Will be interesting to see which app(s) become available to use this protocol.
It’s been widely reported that the Google-Apple APIs are being rolled out already, but deactivated by default until a supporting and authorised app is installed to make use of it.
Here’s the Android version of the settings screen from my phone:
Note this is just the API support, and only authorised apps with approved cryptographic keys can make use it, so Google and Apple are still very much in control of who can use it and when. From the API docs:
I guess it’s important to get this part rolled out as soon as possible to as many phones in order to support any apps which do need to use the API, for trials or real deployment.
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curiously, my i-phone 4 does not seem to have this feature.
Your phone is (only just) too old to support “Bluetooth Low Energy” unfortunately. It was first introduced on the iPhone 4S (2011)
Actually I do have the much sought after 4s model Chris. I just didn’t want others to feel as if I was showing off.
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You need to make sure you have the latest update installed - 13.5.1 - I think that might be the issue - don’t think the 4S supports iOS13
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I very much doubt it Clausy !
Just be careful with that update, it causes screen issues, it has effected eldest daughters X.
I very much doubt your eldest has an i-phone 4S !
She wouldn’t be seen dead with such an “old” phone. So much for our woke environmentally aware yoof🙄
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true that !
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