British app for tracking contacts — a master class of how not delatestryl Dragun | 22.06.2020
Britain takes advantage of one of the largest health systems where one payer and database of all patients. The possibility of collecting data across the system has led to
the opening of dexamethasone as one of the most promising means of coronavirus.
It is not surprising that a proposal to launch a smart phone app and contact tracing has enabled the officials of the Ministry of health to create advanced technology. But on Thursday, the British
the government has announced that it abandons its original plan in favor of a much more simple option. This has caused concern about the prospects of tracking technology contacts
General. What happened?
Digital tracing of contacts — notifications from phone to phone that can warn users about potential exposure to diseases is a new technology. The use of such
applications is not checked. It is expected that would collect information and look for patterns of disease spread: to identify clusters, to detect early outbreaks.
It is this idea that prompted officials and developers of the Ministry of health to advocate for a centralized model of your application. They believed that information is collected in a secure data store and
impersonal, and people will be warned if they come into contact with infected.
A centralized approach would allow much more research data than decentralized models. But the desire to make the world’s best app and gain fame has played a cruel joke with
officials.
The first issue was the Bluetooth performance. In practice, obtaining accurate results is difficult, and the improvement of their quality required significant extra work from the developers
app.
To protect your privacy, Apple and Google have created their own tools so as not to transfer the user data to the shared processing center. Britain decided to make an exception and
to create an application that bypasses protection, developed by Apple and Google.
Progress in the British application was better than I thought some skeptics: the developers found a trick that helped him to work on Android phones. It was not enough for the tool
intended for wide deployment during the global crisis in health.
A month ago, the UK government has tasked a team to begin development of a second application that uses the decentralized model. Two competing systems were created in tandem with
substantial costs.
The development coincided with a chaotic series of reorganizations in upper management. There are new bosses, and the teams swapped positions. This led to the fact that a broader tracking program was
disabled — IN worked incorrectly.
This week the government finally announced that the UK will abandon its centralized application in favor of decentralized backup. The contract was signed
a week before the announcement about it.
UK now wants to create an application with functionality similar to the one used by other countries.
Lost time and unclear success of other countries does not make it clear whether the new system ever work and how it will help against coronavirus.
Critics see the failure of the centralized applications that the UK has lost the battle with Google and Apple. The country has not undertaken any efforts to force companies to reduce protection
privacy. She just asked them to voluntarily make concessions. Tech giants, seeing that many other countries are happy to take a decentralized approach, has not receded. In the end
Britain decided that the fight is not worth the effort.
The problem is that the team focused on the potential benefits of centralized application and initially did not take into account all the additional problems that it encountered. External
problems were ignored. The project was managed erratically and became the subject of bureaucratic disputes. The result was overspending, wasted effort and, worse, wasted time.
mobile app
Hot topics: Coronavirus leads the world in crisis
