Joint Statement
Date: 29 April 2020
We, the undersigned, are scientists and researchers working in the UK in the fields of information security and privacy. We are concerned about plans by NHSX to deploy a contact tracing application. We urge that the health benefits of a digital solution be analysed in depth by specialists from all relevant academic disciplines, and sufficiently proven to be of value to justify the dangers involved.
A contact tracing application is a mobile phone application which records, using Bluetooth, the contacts between individuals, in order to detect a possible risk of infection. Such applications, by design, come with risks for privacy and medical confidentiality which can be mitigated more or less well, but not completely, depending on the approach taken in their design. We believe that any such application will only be used in the necessary numbers if it gives reason to be trusted by those being asked to install it.
It has been reported that NHSX is discussing an approach which records centrally the de-anonymised ID of someone who is infected and also the IDs of all those with whom the infected person has been in contact. This facility would enable (via mission creep) a form of surveillance. Echoing the letter signed by 300 international leading researchers, we note that it is vital that, when we come out of the current crisis, we have not created a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance. Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about individuals must be fully justified. Such invasive information can include the “social graph” of who someone has physically met over a period of time. With access to the social graph, a bad actor (state, private sector, or hacker) could spy on citizens’ real-world activities. We are particularly unnerved by a declaration that such a social graph is indeed aimed for by NHSX.
