NHS Covid app developers 'tried to block rival symptom trackers'

[Northerner]

NHSX, the health service technology unit responsible for the government’s failed contact-tracing app, attempted to block rival apps to protect its own, hampering efforts to track the early spread of the coronavirus.

Developers of several apps were urged to stop work by either NHSX or the Ministry of Defence, who told them their apps might distract attention from NHSX’s app when it was launched. Last week the app was abandoned after three months, with work beginning on an alternative design without any deadline.

Prof Tim Spector, of King’s College London, said that NHSX had treated his Covid symptom tracker research team as “the enemy”. “We were hampered from the beginning, in March when we first contacted NHSX,” he told the Observer. “They were very worried about our app taking attention away from theirs and confusing the public.

“Lots of signals went to places like the universities, my university, the medical charities and the royal colleges not to back our app because that would interfere with their one.”

NHS Covid app developers 'tried to block rival symptom trackers'

Developers claim NHSX, the government technology unit, was hostile to other groups, hampering the fight against the disease

www.theguardian.com

It just gets worse

 

[Eddy Edson]

Oh, man.

I saw Hancock's comments today blaming Apple for stuff that everybody else in the world has been working around for months.

 

[Docb]

More and more are referring to him as hapless Hancock. I have some sympathy for him because he is obliged to spout the party line even though he seems rarely to understand much of what he is talking about.

The other night, he and his IT guru Dido whatsit hacked off both Google and Apple by implying that they were both useless because they could reveal that they had found out that their systems were incompatible. Anything to deflect from the fact that the idea of developing a homespun system was daft and promising that it would be world beating was ridiculous.

 

[Eddy Edson]

More and more are referring to him as hapless Hancock. I have some sympathy for him because he is obliged to spout the party line even though he seems rarely to understand much of what he is talking about.

The other night, he and his IT guru Dido whatsit hacked off both Google and Apple by implying that they were both useless because they could reveal that they had found out that their systems were incompatible. Anything to deflect from the fact that the idea of developing a homespun system was daft and promising that it would be world beating was ridiculous.

It's main effect seems to have been as a smokescreen seflecting from the mega-daftness of outsourcing TTI management to a call centre company.

 

[Northerner]

Oh, man.

I saw Hancock's comments today blaming Apple for stuff that everybody else in the world has been working around for months.

He also insisted that they had been talking to Apple for weeks, despite Apple saying they hadn't It seems wrong to trust the word of a multinational corporation over a government minister, but as far as I can see the government decided to spin the yearn that both apps were being tested from the start, and now Hancock has to lie to maintain that threadbare fiction

 

[Bruce Stephens]

He also insisted that they had been talking to Apple for weeks, despite Apple saying they hadn't

I'm sure there have been discussions, since the main issue that NHSX had with Google and Apple's approach is the latter's privacy features, which they've not been willing to budge on.

However, the more recent argument that Hancock and others have been making is that they've got a better way to measure distance, implying (but not actually saying) that Apple's rejected that.

I assume he's deliberately confusing at least those two things and that there's been essentially no discussion about anything other than the desire to collect more information than Google and Apple are willing to offer.