COVID-19 mobile tracking app: Everything you need to know
A voluntary mobile tracking app will alert Australians if they have been exposed to the coronavirus allowing health officials to rapidly isolate infection outbreaks and speed up easing restrictions.
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WHAT IS THE COVID 19 TRACKING APP AND WHEN IS IT AVAILABLE?
A voluntary mobile tracking app will alert Australians if they have been exposed to the coronavirus allowing health officials to rapidly isolate infection outbreaks and speed up easing restrictions.
The federal government app is expected to be ready for the public to download within weeks, with the hope millions of people will sign up to boost Australia’s contact tracing capability.
A person who used the app and tested positive for COVID-19 could notify health authorities so an alert was sent to anyone they had been in contact with for 15 minutes or more in the 24 hours prior to symptoms.
Anyone who also has the app installed and has come into contact with an infected person would then be told to isolate and get tested.
If that person has coronavirus symptoms, they can then volunteer to share their own contact data with health authorities who can then continue the contact tracing.
With improved capacity to quickly identify and quarantine anyone exposed to the coronavirus, Australia would be in a much better position to then lift some shutdown measures.
Tech experts say the tracing app will require some privacy trade off to achieve a public health benefit, but are urging government transparency so the risks can be minimised.
Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre chief Rachael Falk said her team had been playing an “active role” in reviewing the app.
“We need more time and information before we can give this a final thumbs up, but the app already passes the early tests of security and privacy,” she said.
UNSW Canberra Associate Professor Frank den Hartog said many questions around the app could not be answered until the specifications and code are published.
“Actually, the service specifications should have been published a long time ago, followed by an open expert consultation for feedback to the service specification and an assessment of the 60-plus apps that already exist worldwide,” he said.
Dr David Glance from the University of Western Australia Centre for Software and Security Practice said while the details of the app remained unknown, the Singapore version it was based on did raise some issues.
“There are some privacy concerns with this approach because of the role of the health authorities in collecting and using the information gathered and the use of personally identifiable information,” he said.
“There are also unknown security issues with the application that can only be discovered once the application is made available.”
HOW DOES THE COVID TRACKING APP WORK?
The mobile app does not track location.
It uses Bluetooth to identify when a person comes into close contact - about 1.5m - with someone else who also has the app installed and makes a log of the interaction if it lasts for at least 15 minutes.
The app collects four things: a name, mobile number, age and postcode.
The postcode is used to determine which state or territory health authority should be sent the contact tracing information.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert said the tracing app essentially digitises a current “manual process”.
“If you contract the virus, health officials will sit down and say, who have you been close to, who you chatted with, who you spend time with,” he said.
“The COVID trace app digitises that.”
WHERE IS THE DATA STORED?
Once the app has collected the name and number of the other person with the app a user has come into contact with, the data is encrypted and stored locally on their phone.
If that user tests positive for COVID19, health authorities will request permission to access the log for contact tracing.
The data will go to a secure national data store, and then straight to the state or territory health authority for teams of health workers to start alerting others who may have been exposed to the virus.
When a person deletes the app from their phone the data would also be deleted.
The federal government has also said it will be deleting the national data store after the pandemic.
PRIVACY: WHO CAN SEE THE DATA?
The user will not be able to read the log of people that they have been in contact with at any time.
Mr Robert said the data will only be accessed by local health authorities in the relevant state or territory.
“I’m not interested in where you are on the face of the earth,” he said.
“State Health authorities are interested in who you’re with for the purpose only of determining whether they’ve got a potentially life threatening virus, so it’s nothing to do with government knowing where you are.
“It’s a health response, the data can only be used for health purposes, and once it’s been used, it gets destroyed.”
More details about the app are expected to be released by the government in the coming weeks.