Yeah I understand that view.
I’m choosing to be optimistic that it will work, and I will wait to reserve judgement and see how it goes.
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Actions people are taking now are having serious consequences for other people. I don’t think these people deserve the right to decide, currently. It’s a serious situation - imagine it as wartime. It’s not so dissimilar.
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Would never be legislated it’s totally not workable, if someone wants to install it then fair enough, if someone doesn’t want to install it for whatever reason then that’s fair enough an all.
I think similarly on this.
Normally, I would have a libertarian kind of attitude as much as possible - but I do think that your freedoms stop when they conflict with somebody else’s.
The right to have a dangerous gun, just for fun, would come under that for me and so would the current restrictions.
People are being stupid and selfish and it is the elderly who will suffer. They are only being so stupid because they know it’s extremely unlikely to affect them as badly as others. So in that situation you have to put pressure on their selfish impulses by threatening fines, etc.
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In a genuine emergency, we wouldn’t.
But I think that is right because there are people out there who are a dangerous combination of stupid and selfish - they don’t understand and can’t comprehend the importance of measures, so they flout them. You can’t allow that to happen in an emergency situation as it puts everybody in danger.
Things like the WWII blackout wouldn’t work if they had been voluntary.
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If there was a war happening, and people were making choices which causes serious risk to the country and other people within it - I’d wholly expect that something serious was done to forcibly stop them.
I’m not saying I want that to become the new normal, but exceptional circumstances such as those that we are in now call for exceptional measures and some freedoms to be removed (such as the lock down etc.)
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Also, in respect of this current crisis, I think voluntary buy-in was Boris’s personal preference anyway. He tried it and it didn’t work.
Remember when we were told to simply stay 6 feet or 2 metres apart and wash our hands “two times happy birthday”?
People mocked it and didn’t follow it, it didn’t work. It was so simple and people still said they “thought it was confusing”!
Later, we were criticised for not having more formal measures sooner - they may not have been needed if people had followed the rules.
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I see.
In practice, with a majority government, whatever the Prime Minister wants would be pushed through anyway. So it doesn’t make much practical difference, but I understand if you see it as an important formalising procedure.
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I agree with this, and I think most of the population do. It’s the small selfish minority who are the problem.
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The first thing the app does is tell you it doesn’t track where you are.
The next thing it does is ask where you are.
Uninstalled.
It asks the first three letters / numbers of your postcode so that it can locate roughly where you are in the country - this is not tracking your location. This is to help identify areas where there are outbreaks.
As someone that works in school I’m hoping people install this app to help keep all the staff and those that have to work with the public on a day to day basic little safer.
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Yes, but a single piece of PII attached to an anonymised dataset is frequently enough to completely de-anonymise it.
I’m not installing the app again until people have had a chance to review the source code.
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Does this help?
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I’m guessing even if these sceptics knew how to read the source code (which is freely available on GitHub) and see it can’t even access your location still wouldn’t use it as it’s against the narrative.
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Been using the Scottish version since it came out it is a lot more basic and you just install and forget it but it’s not had any notable battery issues with it.
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The weather app on your phones will probably track your location more than the Covid app. Battery impact from BT is going to be so unnoticeable these days.
The whole premise of the app is contact tracing, not location tracking. We need to collectively work together to beat this and the app is one of the strongest tools we have.
From the NHS site:
“The app cannot track your location, monitor whether you are self-isolating, access your personal identity or any other information on your phone.”
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Downloaded it, will have to see if it works or not
One thing, the signup flow for it is broken on iOS - it says there is an app available in your area, takes you to the app store, which has just the Scottish & NI Apps. Let’s see if it appears over time
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I’ve installed it on Android 11 with no issues or problems so far. Well, other than my area being reported as high risk…
And it looks a lot better than the previous IoW beta.
I’m interested to try the QR feature which I think is fantastic in theory but if the uptake by businesses and public locations displaying official QR codes is low then it’ll fail, unfortunately.
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Where I work we were told that displaying the QR code posters is now a legal requirement.
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I think it’s a requirement now. We’re printing a bunch for local businesses this morning.
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