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LONDON, April 30 (Reuters) - Leading privacy advocates in
Britain have urged the government to prevent a soon-to-be
launched COVID-19 contact tracing app from turning into a form
of state surveillance.
Countries are rushing to develop apps which, along with a
wider testing and tracking programme, are seen as key to easing
social distancing rules that have all but shut global economies.
Matthew Gould, chief executive of the National Health
Service's technology group NHSX, told a parliamentary committee
on Tuesday that an app could be rolled out widely in Britain in
two to three weeks.
It will keep a record of anonymised tokens or identities of
those people the phone's owner has been in contact with. The
data will stay on the phone until the owner becomes symptomatic
when they will have the option to submit the data to the app,
alerting those with whom they came into contact.
Leading academics and scientists working in security and
privacy at universities across Britain published a joint letter
saying Britons would only adopt the app if they felt their
privacy was protected.
"It is vital that, when we come out of the current crisis,
we have not created a tool that enables data collection on the
population, or on targeted sections of society, for
surveillance," they said.
In Europe, most countries have chosen short-range Bluetooth
"handshakes" between mobile devices as the best way to register
a potential contact, although it does not provide location data.
But they have disagreed about whether to log such contacts
on individual devices or on a central server - which would be
more directly useful to existing contact tracing teams.
Germany recently changed course, saying it would join a
growing number of other European countries in adopting a
"decentralised" approach supported by Apple and Google.
Gould told the parliamentary committee he believed the
British app would protect privacy even though it would build a
centralised system. He said NHSX would publish the privacy model
close to launch.
He said later versions of the app could also ask users to
provide more details such as location, if they agreed.
"We really believe there are big advantages to the way we're
doing it but we don't believe that it's privacy endangering," he
said.
Gould was asked during the hearing whether Britain's
National Cyber Security Centre was involved in the decision to
adopt the more centralised approach. He said the body had been
part of the discussions.
(Reporting by Sarah Young and Kate Holton; Editing by Edmund
Blair)