Security News > 2020 > April > Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app
A group of nearly 175 UK academics has criticised the NHS's planned COVID-19 contact-tracing app for a design choice they say could endanger users by creating a centralised store of sensitive health and travel data about them.
The app will emit an electronic ID from your phone and receive the IDs of other phones with the app installed.
Controversially, the NHSX app will beam that contact data back to government-controlled servers.
The academics who signed today's open letter fear that this data stockpile will become "a tool that enables data collection on the population, or on targeted sections of society, for surveillance."
Separately, the Privacy International campaign group, along with most of Britain's leading privacy campaigners, sent 10 questions to shadowy US data analytics company Palantir about what it would be doing with data gathered from the NHS during the pandemic.