On Tuesday, the Isle of Wight became the nation’s Petri dish – the first place to try the NHS’s Covid-19 contact-tracing app. The app is definitely a clever idea: if our phones silently send a unique ID to everyone around us, when we get symptoms the government can alert everyone we have come into contact with. If enough people use the app – the theory goes – we will finally get a grip on the virus, and it will improve our track and tracing capabilities, limiting the spread of the disease. It might even enable us to get back to normal (or normal-ish) life more quickly.
There’s just one problem: the app might not work.
The reason why is technical, but important. For the app to be useful, it needs to be running on our phones all the time – so that it continues to transmit and receive the Bluetooth signals that determine who we have been in contact with.
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