Australian government sticks with COVIDSafe app

The Federal Government seems intent on sticking with its current COVIDSafe app despite a meeting with Apple yesterday.

The Australian Government’s COVIDSafe app on an iPhone in Sydney. Picture: AFP

The Federal Government seems intent on sticking with its current COVIDSafe app despite a meeting with Apple yesterday.

Health Minister Greg Hunt met with the company after the public release of software developed by Google and Apple that makes it easy for countries to build their own contact tracing apps.

Contact tracing apps connect to nearby phones by Bluetooth and collect encrypted phone IDs of people you come into contact with. A user can opt to share these IDs with health workers should they later test positive to COVID-19.

On Thursday, Apple and Google released APIs (application programming interfaces) that let countries tap into existing smartphone functionality and quickly build their own contact tracing apps. The Apple and Google system already has tackled issues such as Bluetooth reliability and minimising power drainage. Countries don’t have to start developing their apps from scratch.

A future version of the Apple-Google platform won’t require users to even download an app. In countries that adopt it, contact tracing will be built into the operating system and users will receive a notification inviting them to activate the functionality. Users of this system can toggle contact collection on and off in phone settings. This system however is still months away.

Apple and Google say that some US states and 22 countries on five continents have asked for and received access to the APIs with more expected to join in the coming weeks.

Australia independently has put months of work into developing the COVIDSafe app from the source code of Singapore’ TraceTogether app and appears intent on staying with that rather than shifting to the Apple-Google alternative.

It is understood Apple requested the meeting with Mr Hunt to discuss its health road map, screening tools, wearable devices as well as the COVIDSafe app, and that Apple and the government will hold more technical ongoing discussions on both the Google/Apple platform and Bluetooth.

A government spokesman says one of the spin-offs has been significant enhancements to Bluetooth with COVIDSafe.

However, it seems the government wants to stay with its version of a contact saving app as it says it gives public health officials “confidence that cases are followed up to minimise the risk of a spread of the virus”.

Apple’s and Google’s system is regarded as the better alternative privacy wise, as encrypted user contact information isn’t stored centrally.

The app notifies users anonymously should data indicate they had been in contact with an infected user, but the government has no idea who these new contacts are and health workers have to depend on them to get tested and notify authorities.

COVIDSafe is less ideal privacy wise as health workers can obtain the phone numbers of people at risk by decoding the ID’s stored on the phone of a person testing positive. But it means those found to have been in the proximity of an infected person can be contacted quickly.

There are countries that have built their own apps that might switch the Google-Apple platform such as the UK. Media reports suggest it might eventually ditch its own app and make the switch.

The Australian Department of Health meanwhile seems to be satisfied with the performance of the COVIDSafe app on iPhones, despite earlier concern that the Bluetooth signal was not reliable unless the app ran in the foreground on the phone.

Department of Health Chief Information Officer, Daniel Keys said the department was continuing to enhance the app’s Bluetooth operation on iPhones and “it is working as designed”.

Mr Hunt’s spokesman said Victorian public health officials had used the app to identify a close contact of an infected person that otherwise was not detected through regular contact tracing.

Proponents argue that while it is true that manual contact tracing works, apps can make the process of contacting people much faster and can uncover people an infected person may not remember, for example strangers you were in close contact with for a substantial period, such as people next to you on a crowded bus or at a queue outside a supermarket.

“Its health protection value has already been demonstrated,” Mr Hunt said yesterday.

The government on Thursday night said there have been 5,947,000 registrations of the COVIDSafe app, which is around 24 per cent of the Australian population.