Security News > 2020 > May > UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told
Gould also told Parliament's Human Rights Committee that data harvested from Britons through NHSX's COVID-19 contact tracing app would be "Pseudonymised" - and appeared to leave the door open for that data to be sold on for "Research".
Key to those is a big green button that the user presses to send 28 days' worth of contact data to the NHS. Written by tech arm NHSX, Britain's contact-tracing app breaks with international convention by opting for a centralised model of data collection: all the contact-tracing data is kept under one roof in one central government database.
In response to questions from Scottish Nationalist MP Joanna Cherry this afternoon, Gould told MPs: "The data can be deleted for as long as it's on your own device. Once uploaded all the data will be deleted or fully anonymised with the law, so it can be used for research purposes."
You then donk the big green button to send all that data to the NHS for research.
Thanks to the large output variations between different Bluetooth Low Energy chipsets in different handsets, that data is used - along with the phone model identifier collected by the app - to work out a rough proxy for distance.