With Britain in lockdown, the government has been racing to find ways to ease restrictions without putting public safety at risk. One solution is a contact-tracing app that can enable digital contact-tracing on a large scale using bluetooth. One such app is under development by NHSX with researchers from Oxford University. Though tech giants Apple and Google announced they would tweak their smartphone operating systems to help digital contact-tracing, the UK is an outlier in rejecting this approach.

Is Britain sleepwalking into another coronavirus blunder by failing to listen to global consensus and expert analysis with the release of this app? Does NHSX, as IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon has suggested, have all the hallmarks of another government IT fiasco? 

Emma Revell, IEA Head of Communications, is joined by Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs at the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open Rights Group.

In the episode, Victoria refers to her blog post for the IEA website which you can read here https://iea.org.uk/the-nhsx-contact-tracing-app-unresolved-civil-liberties-and-privacy-issues/