While the English government insisted on trying to reinvent the wheel, semi-autonomous Scotland did the sensible thing and went with the off-the-shelf decentralised model.

The United Kingdom has been anything but when it comes to COVID-19 policy, with England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all making their own choices when it comes to lockdown and that sort of thing. For a while it looked like the whole UK would go with a single contact tracing policy, but the UK government has made such a hash of it that Scotland has decided to go its own way.

Protect Scotland uses the platform and API developed by Google and Apple, which unlocks special features of smartphones that run their software that allows them to use Bluetooth at all times to detect proximity to other phone users. This allows users to be notified when anyone they have come into recent contact with tells their app they have the plague. What they then do with that information is their business.

The reason it remains their business is that the data collection is decentralised and anonymised. It doesn’t identify the user, nor their location and, most importantly is not made available to any third party. Not only is this vital from a civil liberties perspective, it also streamlines and speeds up the whole process and the fact that is doesn’t invite the government to spy on you makes it more likely people will install and use the app.

Here’s how the First Minister of Scotland announced it.