Thread by @AdamWagner1

This is correct. People reading news about police getting data from NHS contact tracing should not confuse this with data from the app. App only stores data locally, cannot be accessed by government or police, and an *app* notification does not trigger legal duty to self-isolate

https://twitter.com/nhscovid19app/status/1317749191775584256

Getting a notification from the app does trigger a *moral* duty to self-isolate because that’s the government guidance but it has no legal effect and you can’t be fined of prosecuted for disobeying it legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/1045…

This is very interesting as it has made me suspect that the reason the app was excluded from the self isolation law is that the government knew they would not be able to give the police access to the data, because the data was only locally stored. So you couldn’t prove an offence

This goes back to what the @HumanRightsCtte said in its first report about the proposed app, where govt would hold the data, which I worked on with them. It raised huge privacy concerns because once govt had the data it will inevitably use it for wider purposes. And here we are..

... but since govt was unable to develop/sell a centralised app, and the data protecting version came instead, the danger is coming from ‘manual’ contact tracing. But as the Joint Committee said, if people don’t trust you with their data they won’t give it. So it fails even more