NHS drops COVID 19 tracking app due to data security fears

Finally, its official that the Corona Virus tracking app dubbed NHSX meant to be launched by Britain’s NHS by this month-end has been abandoned due to data security fears. 

The Ministry of Defense on consultation with the officials of the National Health Service has urged the developers of the app to stop the work as their latest findings confirmed that the app was incapable of working on millions of phones across the UK and exhibited severe data vulnerabilities which could be otherwise exploited by hackers.

NHSX, which is the digital arm of NHS and was supposed to name the COVID Symptom Tracking app with the same name. But was consistently being trolled by various security experts for failing miserably in various security trials since May this year.

First security researchers across the country proved that the coronavirus tracking app failed to work on Apple iPhones’. And then the app got stuck in the data controversy as it was conducting mass reporting from members of the public to calculate the risk of them being infected with the virus. Thirdly, many other app developers- individuals and companies started to work on the spin-off version of the app making the NHS first urge them to stop work on their respective digital COVID trackers and later abandoning the development of their app.

Highly placed sources say that the health care organization of Britain might depend on one of the app developed by either Google or Apple, Inc as they liked the work & results shown by a similar Indian tracking app named Aarogya Setu working wonderfully to isolate the population of over 1.8 Billion from getting infected with the deadly ‘Kung Flu’.

Note 1- UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that his officials were committed to developing a Covind 19 tracker app, although the government failed at it on an initial note.

Note 2- The Indian Aarogya Setu app is a Corona Virus tracking app which keeps a track of the mobile phones which have come into the vicinity of the app users in the past 15 days through Bluetooth.

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Naveen Goud
Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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