12 Apr 2021
Silicon Valley tech giants Apple and Google have blocked an update to the British government’s coronavirus contact tracing app from their respective app stores as the update shared the locations of users with the government, violating privacy regulations.
An update to the National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 app was intended to be released in time with the loosening of lockdown restrictions in the UK on Monday.
The previous incarnation of the contact tracing app, which is still active on both Android and iOS devices, logs location data on a user’s device rather than it being sent to a centralised database. The app on the user’s device then compares the location data it holds against the NHS database to notify a user if an outbreak has occurred in a place they have visited.