UK government is set to release a contact tracking app that uses different approach to Apple/Google API

Photo by John Simitopoulos on Unsplash

Contact tracing app will make it easier for governments to track who came in contact with a person who tested positive for COVIS-19, it will also be helpful to alert the individuals to self-isolate if they came in contact with a coronavirus patient. The model that Apple and Google collaboratively made has been successful and was followed around the world.

But the UK government has chosen to make their own model for the contact tracing app that they are releasing, while Apple/Google made a model that follows the decentralized system, the UK government have chosen to follow the centralized system, the reason for this is because they think that centralized system will give them more insights on the COVID-19's spread, reported by BBC News.

Normally these apps are used to alert people if they have the risk of getting COVID-19 based on whether they came in contact with an infected person, on a decentralized model this tracing happens on people phone's but on a centralized system this will happen on a computer server, Apple and Google say that their model is more secure.

Because there is no chance for hacking as the process happens on individual handsets instead on a single server, but Prof Christophe Fraser, one of the epidemiologists advising NHSX, told the BBC that,

"One of the advantages is that it's easier to audit the system and adapt it more quickly as scientific evidence accumulates, the principal aim is to give notifications to people who are most at risk of having got infected, and not to people who are much lower risk. It's probably easier to do that with a centralised system."

Many world governments have followed the decentralized model to alert the citizens, some other governments like Germany who first opted for a centralized model later changed the approach to a decentralized model, with that, only France and UK speak positively to follow the decentralized model to make contact tracing apps.

The Apple/Google made model will also consume less battery in the process where the decentralized model will take up more charge as it involves waking up the app in the background every time the phone detects another device running the same software.