Police could be granted access to details gathered by the COVID-19 contact tracing app in call centers. The force will not have access to data gathered via the COVID-19 contact tracing app, and the Department of Health and Social Care has said information will only be shared with appropriate safeguards and in accordance with the law. But the British Medical Association has raised concerns the move could deter people from being tested for the virus altogether.
The developers of the Covid-19 contact tracing app for England and Wales have stressed that none of the data it uses will be shared with the police.
It followed news that the contact details of people told to self-isolate by the NHS Test and Trace scheme in England would be shared with the police on a case-by-case basis.
However, the application will be operated independently of this system. It has been downloaded more than 14m times since it launched in September month 2020. The news from NHS Test and Trace on Sunday led to worried application users taking to social media to say they would delete it over privacy concerns.
The Department for Health and Social Care told them that neither the police nor the government received any data from the contact tracing app. In a tweet, the official account for the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app said that the app cannot be used to track your location, for law enforcement, or to monitor self-isolation and social distancing.
Recommendations to self-isolate which come via the contact tracing app are not legally enforceable – unlike an instruction by a phone call from NHS Test and Trace. The application has been built so that not only is all the data it collects anonymized, but it also only exists on individual handsets.
Its design of the application’s data cannot be shared. It is held locally on the phone commented Prof Alan Woodward, a computer scientist from Surrey University. Even if the police did get hold of it, it is all anonymized so it would not mean anything to them.
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