'Protect Scotland' COVID-19 Exposure Notification app now works in England, Wales

Scotland has updated its coronavirus exposure notification app to be interoperable with platforms in England and Wales, following a similar update that enabled compatibility with apps in Jersey and Northern Ireland.

The Protect Scotland app launched to the public in September in an effort to track and mitigate the spread of coronavirus. At the time, however, it only worked within Scotland's borders.

On Wednesday, the Scottish government announced that it has developed a "federated server" that allows all COVID-19 contact tracing apps to work together. That includes existing apps in the U.K., Crown Dependencies, and Gibraltar, with interoperability added in phases.

"From today, the second phase of this interoperability means that Protect Scotland will continue working when people are required to travel for essential reasons to England, Wales and Gibraltar," the government said.

Previously, on Oct. 28, Protect Scotland became interoperable with apps in Northern Ireland and Jersey. Phase three will include similar apps from other countries and regions.

The Scottish government said that more than 1.5 million people have downloaded Protect Scotland since its launch, and more than 13,000 have received an exposure notification.

Like other apps based on the Apple-Google Exposure Notification framework, Protect Scotland operates using Bluetooth in the background and exchanges anonymous identifiers to track potential COVID-19 exposure. No data is stored on central servers, and personally identifiable information isn't collected.

1 Comment

hodar 366 comments · 14 Years

About 4 years ago

The virus is airborne, it lives on surfaces, and can be spread person to person by touch, as well as by animals.

So, a person that sneezes, coughs or is infected in a large store, will probably move around the store; just like a normal person would. He will leave a trail of viri in the air he breathes that will move along with normal air currents.

It's a virus, like Chicken Pox, AIDS, Common Cold, Hepatitis, Rabies, West Nile, Meningitis, Zilka or Rubella to name a few. You can try to hide from it, you can destroy the economy - but it doesn't care. It's not going to magically disappear. It's a part of our environment, and it will remain so, mutating and waiting. It was created (name a single pandemic in the history of mankind that has spared babies, and targeted the elderly) by China, and probably released through incompetence. But, it's now with us; and is 99% survivable if you are under 70, and 94.5% survivable if you are over 70

Tracing apps are pretty pointless. China could have contained it in China, they could have shut themselves down - they didn't.