The spending for the app mushroomed from the £26m in the budget to £43m, according to a report [PDF] from spending watchdog the National Audit Office.
Speaking to the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee, Dido Harding, former chief executive at TalkTalk whose tenure saw one of the biggest information security breaches in UK corporate history, said the £14m spent on the central database approach was not wasted. Because of the work that we did with it, we were able to develop – together with Google and Apple – a much more effective algorithm, and Google and Apple have both recognised that.
Barely holding back a cynical laugh, former programmer Dawn Butler, a Labour MP on the committee, pointed out that Google and Apple had been helping build contact-tracing apps around the world long before they d begun working on the app for England and Wales, and had publicly stated (as