In a major U-turn, the UK is ditching the way its current coronavirus-tracing app works and shifting to a model based on technology provided by Apple and Google.
The Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-focused.
However, it means epidemiologists will have access to less
data.
The government now intends to launch an app in the autumn, however it says the product may not involve contact tracing at that point, external.
Instead the software may be limited to enabling users to report their symptoms and order a test.
Baroness Dido Harding - who heads up the wider Test and Trace programme - will only give the green light to actually deploying the Apple-Google technology if she judges it to be fit for purpose, which she does not believe is the case at present. It is possible this may never happen.
Germany, Italy and Denmark are among other countries to have switched from a so-called "centralised" approach to a "decentralised" one.
Who are the BBC? The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over
What is ContactTracing? Contact tracing is the process of identification of persons who may have come into contact with an infected person ("contacts"). By tracing the contacts of infected individuals, testing them for infection, treating the infected and tracing their contacts in turn, public health aims to reduce
infections in the population. Diseases for which contact tracing is commonly performed for include tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable infections like measles, sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), blood-borne infections, some serious bacterial infections, and novel infections (e.g. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2).
Who is Google? Google LLC is an American multinational technology company. Google specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies alongside
Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.
What is Government? A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a means by which organizational policies are enforced, as well as a
mechanism for determining policy. Each government has a kind of constitution, a statement of its governing principles and philosophy.
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