SW1 and the app that will unlock Britain

By Simon Gentry, Managing Partner

Have you downloaded Signal yet?  If not, you’re late to the party.  The denizens of Westminster and Whitehall are rapidly moving their conspiracies and gossip onto the independent, US-based and ultra-secure messaging app en mass, hoping their secrets will be safer there.  It’s end-to-end encrypted and the messages vanish after a time.  Perfect for those who want short digital histories.

Which is ironic given the front pages of almost all the nation’s newspapers today focus on a certain individual’s private life… (the Sun with another classic – “Prof Lockdown broke lockdown to get his trousers down”). But it’s not as ironic as the fact that it is exactly the same people who will, in a few weeks seek to persuade us to download an app which gives the state total transparency about where we have been, with whom and for how long. 

The reason they want us to breach our own privacy in this way is that if we the become ill with Covid-19, they will be able to use the record of all our movement to track down and inform everyone we’ve come into contact that they may have been exposed to someone with the disease. The same people who seek out super-secure and private platforms to conduct their lives, are proposing electronically tagging the entire population of the United Kingdom.  George Orwell himself would be impressed.

A poll by Ipsos MORI for the Financial Times found that up to 35% of the public would not trust the government with their private data.  I think that’s an underestimate and that when the details emerge and people begin to think about it, the number who choose not to download it will be a much higher.  

Crises, as our CEO Emma Kane often points out, expose an organisations character, they don’t make it.  And that’s a bit of what is happening here. The NHS is well known for a very long list of very expensive and well publicised IT failures. After so many failures, few would be fully confident that the government’s IT team is capable of delivering something in a matter of weeks that is superior to that which the likes of Apple or Google can deliver.

The NHS app will probably be downloaded by millions and it may do what it is designed to do, we all hope so I think, but all those in SW1 know that by downloading Signal they are actually proving the point of the doubters.