Yesterday (26th April 2020) the Australian Government released its new contact tracing app, COVIDSafe. This app is an important step in the Government’s plan for us to live with COVID-19 during the pandemic. At Episub, we work with technology and care about individual privacy and security. Here we explain a little about how this app works, and why we are comfortable using it.
COVIDSafe is designed to help health officials with contact tracing. When an individual tests positive for COVID-19 and is a user of COVIDSafe, this will provide a means by which those officials can more easily identify those that have been in contact with that individual. Importantly, it doesn’t work by tracking the location of users, but rather by using bluetooth to identify nearby devices that also have the app installed. Nearby phones with the app installed exchange encrypted details of their encounter:
- Date and time
- Distance (as measured by bluetooth signal strength)
- Duration
- Reference code to identify the individual
This data is stored on your phone encrypted in a way that cannot be accessed. Should you be diagnosed with COVID-19, you will be asked by these health officials to upload your phone’s COVIDSafe data, an action which can be done through the application at the direction of health officials.
After this pandemic is over, you will be asked to remove the app from your device, and the data that has been collected on centralised servers will also be deleted. Furthermore, if you wish to opt out earlier, you can remove the app from your phone at any time and submit a request to the government for your data on their servers to be deleted.
We at Episub are strong believers in protecting the privacy and security of individuals’ personal data. Our analysis of the COVIDSafe app is that the government has taken adequate steps to protect individual data and privacy, such that we have no concerns with using such an app. We are also not greatly concerned by the storage of data on Amazon owned servers within Australia. The collected data described above is only uploaded when requested by health officials. Furthermore, it is challenging to deploy an app of this scale without making use of resources offered by commercial data centers like Amazon’s.
It is difficult in our current world to avoid sharing masses of personal data with corporations such as Google and Apple, without thereby locking ourselves out of things of great value. It is therefore pleasing to see the government following a different path of collecting only what is needed to address the pandemic, and not attempting to overreach. At Episub, we are already using this app ourselves.
For more information, including where to download the app, and details of how it works and information shared, please check the following:
