LONDON (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.
FILE PHOTO: A staff member takes a sample at a COVID-19 testing centre amid the coronavirus disease outbreak, at Glasgow Airport, in Glasgow, Scotland April 29, 2020. Andrew Milligan/Pool via REUTERS
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…
Source Reuters Tech News
Source link
