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Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
In London, during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, young black men were stopped and searched by police 21,950 times with no further action taken in 80% of cases. If each individual were searched only once - which may not be the case - that would equate to 30% of all young black males in London. The Metropolitan police increased its use of stop and search during the lockdown, carrying out 43,000 stops in May 2020, more than double the number in May 2019. The Met responded that crime is also not…
Content type: Examples
19th October 2020
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content type: Examples
23rd September 2020
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content type: Examples
24th July 2020
In early July the Open Rights Group issued a pre-action legal letter to UK health secretary Matt Hancock and the Department of Health and Social Care saying they have breached requirements under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR by failing to conduct an impact assessment for the Test and Trace system. ORG and its lawyers, AWO, had been asking for details of the DPIA since the beginning of June, a few days after the system was launched. In their response, the DHSC’s lawyers said “there were…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
Seventeen of 93 UK prosecutions for breaches of emergency coronavirus laws in May were incorrect or for offences that did not exist. All but one of the 17 were stopped at the first court appearance. In total, nine prosecutions were brought under the Coronavirus Act; all were dismissed because there was no evidence the people concerned were potentially infectious, which is what the act covers. Of the 84 brought under the health protection regulations, four were withdrawn because they related to…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
UK police reported to be planning separate contact tracing system
Police forces in the UK are planning their own contact tracing system because they are concerned that giving details to the national contact tracing system would compromise undercover operations and working methods. Options under discussion include having police forces take over all contact tracing for police officers and staff or seconding staff from the NHS test and trace system to police forces. Health officials, however, say…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
After the CEO of NHSx told the the UK parliament that data harvested by the NHSx contact tracing app would be retained for future research, the UK Ministry of Defence said it would turn the data over to its Jhub to sanitise the data and remove all personally identifying information before passing it on to NHSx. The app was due for improvements to its security after the code was released on Github and the app was trialled on the Isle of Wight.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/20/…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
The outsourcing company Serco, which the UK government has contracted to perform contact tracing, accidentally shared the email addresses of almost 300 of the contact tracers it hired when a staff member sent an introductory email and used CC rather than blind CC. Serco does not intend to refer itself to the Information Commissioner's office.
Writer: Ross Hawkins
Publication: BBC
Content type: Examples
19th October 2020
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%. The govt’s SAGE committee has said that 80% of infected people’s contacts just be contacted and told to self-isolate within 48 to 72 hours for the programme to be effective. Local councils are…
Content type: Examples
23rd September 2020
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%. The govt’s SAGE committee has said that 80% of infected people’s contacts just be contacted and told to self-isolate within 48 to 72 hours for the programme to be effective. Local councils are…
Content type: Examples
19th October 2020
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or performance of these tests. While the tests could be a game-changer by offering rapid, on-the-spot testing with less discomfort for patients, no scientific research was offered to validate the tests, not…
Content type: Examples
23rd September 2020
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or performance of these tests. While the tests could be a game-changer by offering rapid, on-the-spot testing with less discomfort for patients, no scientific research was offered to validate the tests, not…
Content type: Examples
30th November 2020
The UK exams regulator, Ofqual, awarded a £46,000 contract for less than a month’s work providing “urgent communications support” to the small research agency Public First, which is owned by James Frayne, a close associate of prime ministerial special advisor Dominic Cummings, and Rachel Wolf, a former advisor to cabinet minister Michael Gove. This contract brings to more than £1 million the amount of public contracts awarded without tender to Public First. Previous directly awarded contracts…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
Britain’s Cabinet Office awarded an £840,000 contract for researching public opinion about government policies, portions of which involved conducting focus groups related to Brexit rather than COVID-19, to Public First, a company owned by two long-term associates of Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove and special advisor Dominic Cummings, without putting the work out to tender. The government used COVID-19 emergency regulations allowing services to be urgently commissioned to justify…
Content type: Examples
21st September 2020
Following trials in Leicester, Luton, and Blackburn with Darwen, the UK government will assign teams of health care professionals to more than ten local authorities and offer them Public Health England’s near real-time data on infections and a dedicated team of contact tracers, shifting away from its £10 billion centralised national system run under contract by Serco. As of early August, the Serco scheme was still failing to reach a significant proportion of those who had been in close contact…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in England are 54% more likely than white people to be fined for violations of the coronavirus rules, according to an analysis of data published by the National Police Chiefs' Council showing the racial breakdown of the 13,445 fixed-penalty notices recorded between March 27 and May 11. BAME people were fined at a rate of 26 per 100,000, compared to white people at 16.8 per 100,000; the comparison raised questions as to whether the fines were fairly…
Content type: Examples
30th November 2020
The UK Department of Health has hired the credit-checking company TransUnion to verify the names and addresses of people requesting home coronavirus tests, placing millions at risk of being barred from access to these tests. The government says the purpose is to prevent abuse of the public testing system; TransUnion says it does not run credit checks but uses various third-party sources, including electoral registers, to verify identities. The London Assembly, however, notes that up to 5.8…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
Soon after the UK began reopening pubs with the requirement that staff retain customer details in case they are needed later for contact tracing, a woman reported on Twitter that the next day the bartender messaged her on Facebook. The story was picked up by Refinery29 and the Independent, but taken down at her request. On Twitter, numerous women responded to highlight similar experiences.
https://twitter.com/roselyddon/status/1281885086347075588
https://twitter.com/katebevan/status/…
Content type: Examples
16th October 2020
In the second week of operation of the UK’s contact tracing system a quarter of people who tested positive for COVID-19 could not be reached because they had not supplied phone numbers or email addresses. Of the close contacts whose details were provided, contact tracers reached 90.6% to advise them to self-isolate. Data from the first week also showed that only 75% of contactees could be reached within the target 24 hours; contact was made with another 13.6% within 48 hours, and another 8.6%…
Content type: Examples
16th October 2020
The UK government has instructed bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and churches to record visitors’ contact details when they begin to reopen on July 4 so they can be contacted later if necessary for contact tracing and testing. However, the industry was given no guidance on how to take care of the potentially sensitive data. The ICO said it would monitor developments and assess the data protection implications. Experience in other countries has shown there are risks of abuse by staff.
Source:…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
Within days of the announcement that the UK's new Joint Biosecurity Centre would be run by Tom Hurd, the Home Office's head of counter-terrorism, the government announced that instead it would be moved to the Department of Health and led by Clara Swinson, a senior health official responsible for global and public health. The JBC was intended to assess the pandemic threat on a colour-coded scale similar to that used for terrorism, but public health experts objected that the virus does not behave…
Content type: Examples
17th July 2020
Testing for All is helping small employers and individuals access antibody tests by making them available at £42 each out of fear that “testing inequality” could fuel greater financial inequality, as private schools and big businesses have introduced testing to allow pupils and employees to return to school and work but state schools and small businesses are left to rely on the state. Among the employers adopting antibody testing for staff are Credit Suisse, Ocado, and Premier League football,…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
Governments in Norway, Britain, Qatar, and India, among others, have had to either drop or remediate the contact tracing apps they’ve released to help combat the coronavirus due to the rush in which they were released. Many had security flaws that risked exposing user data; others pose privacy and security risks due to the amount of data they collect. While the apps may be helpful in countries like South Korea, where the medical infrastructure exists to do mass testing and isolation, digital…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
As part of its pandemic-related emergency measures, in April the Scottish government extended the deadline for public bodies to respond to freedom of information requests to 40 days. A month later, it was forced to withdraw the changes after opposition parties on the Scottish parliament's COVID-19 committee voted them down. FoI deadlines will revert to 20 working days, as previously. MSPs also passed an amendment requiring the Scottish government to report to parliament every two months on its…
Content type: Examples
30th November 2020
In mid-September, “human error” led Public Health Wales to post the personal data of all 18,000-odd Welsh residents who tested positive for COVID-19 between the end of February and the end of August to a public server, where for about 20 hours it was readily searchable by any visitor to the site. For 1,926 people who live in enclosed settings such as nursing homes and supported housing, the data included the name of the setting; for the rest the information consisted of initials, date of birth…
Content type: Examples
17th July 2020
Premier League football has set up a COVID-19 testing programme that it says should soon allow socially-distanced fans to return to stadiums using technology from a company called Prenetics, which is also delivering testing for the England cricket team. Prenetics’ digital health passport links an individual’s testing history to their mobile phone; a negative result generates a QR code supporters can scan to access venues.
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/12025028/premier-league-…
Content type: Examples
24th July 2020
After ORG asked questions via its legal representative, AWO’s Ravi Naik, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care agreed to change the period it would retain Test and Trace data from 20 years to eight. Public Health England manager Yvonne Doyle explained that the novelty of COVID-19 was the reason for keeping the data longer, in case PHE needed to get back in touch with those who had tested positive with additional information.
Publication: ZDNet
Writer: Daphne Leprince-Ringuet
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
By the end of March 2021 Eurostar will roll out a facial verification system in which passengers will send a scan of their passport and a selfie so that when boarding they can prove their identity by walking through a camera-lined “biometric” corridor instead of presenting their documents. The Department for Transport is funding the system as part of a £9.4 million competition to revolutionise rail travel and is being developed by the British company iProov in partnership with Eurostar and the…
Content type: Examples
13th July 2020
The UK Government outsourced some of the testing centre work to Deloitte. The contract states that Deloit does not have to share data of positive cases with the UK health authority Public Health England nor to local government authorities. This prevented data sharing that was arguably essential to public health surveillance.
https://twitter.com/johnharris1969/status/1278259630628618241 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/why-is-there-a-delay-in-sharing-covid-19-test-data-with-…
Content type: Examples
16th October 2020
Germany’s contact tracing system is thought to have been critical in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, especially given superspreader events such as infections in meat packing plants. Each of Germany’s 16 federal states is responsible for health, and together with the national Robert Koch Institute they support authorities at city or council level, who are responsible for outbreak investigation and management, including contact tracing.
The country dubbed COVID-19 a notifiable disease early,…