Covid-19: Information Sharing with Police Forces Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateBaroness Lane-Fox of Soho
Main Page: Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberUnderstandably, this news has caused much confusion: you only need to take to social media to see people’s anxieties. As I understand it, the app keeps all data locally on your phone and only when you upload a positive test does it then become more widely available, although anonymised. What measures are the Government going to take to make sure that communications are crystal clear, so that people can totally understand the privacy implications of what they are doing? It seems there is still much anxiety about exactly what can be done.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her insight, but I reassure her that the information on the app is not covered by this memorandum of understanding. That is a principle that has been made very clear by the NHS app. This is the data held on CTAS, the Public Health England database, and it remains the property of Public Health England; the MoU is very specific about that. As the noble Baroness is aware, the app is a distributed source of information; it has extremely high privacy barriers, and this MoU does not in any way breach those barriers.