Coronavirus: Scott Morrison pushes ahead on mobile phone tracing app

Scott Morrison has warned Australians that they may need to ­endure more invasions of their privacy to beat the coronavirus.

Scott Morrison in Canberra on Thursday. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison has warned Australians that they may need to ­endure more invasions of their privacy to beat the coronavirus, as he ramps up the case for a COVID-19 mobile phone tracing app that registers a user’s close physical contact with other users’ mobile phones.

The Prime Minister pushed back on a proposal from Google and Apple to use bluetooth technologies without registering users’ phone numbers, saying the ­Singapore-style app under consideration by the government would more robustly protect the privacy of citizens.

Work is still being done on the privacy implications of the technology-led plan to broaden contact tracing and continue to flatten the COVID-19 curve, but Mr Morrison said it would be necessary to collect personal data before we could end the current lockdown.

“We are still working through ensuring that it meets the privacy protections, which are robust and up to a standard that we believe is necessary for the Australian context, and that is what the Attorney-General (Christian Porter) is working on right now,” Mr Morrison said.

“It is a complex area, but it is a tool that Australia will need to ­pursue on the road out of this that we would like to pursue.”

Apple and Google have offered countries the ability to use bluetooth technologies on 3.8 billion smartphones to trace numbers of people who have come into contact with COVID-19 patients.

The two global tech giants argue that their scheme would ­assuage privacy concerns as the bluetooth traces would reveal only a person’s identity and contact number after they had been tested positive for the coronavirus and their bluetooth code had been loaded on to a trace database.

Mr Morrison said his preferred contact tracing app model, based on work being done in Singapore, was a sturdier privacy model as the person consented directly to having their tracing data collected.

“The Google and Apple proposal does exactly the same thing. It is just that it is not a consent-based model,” he said.

It is still unclear whether Mr Morrison will push his technological plans to boost contract tracing any further by using information collected by Australia’s telecommunications companies.

Mr Morrison’s office said on Tuesday there were no plans yet to use telco data for contact tracing. However, The Australian revealed on Tuesday that the nation’s top telcos — Telstra, Optus and Vodafone — had contacted the federal government offering to boost ­contact-tracing capabilities using metadata that they collected under national security legislation.

The use of metadata collected by telcos under the Telecommunications Data Retention Act 2015 — which was highly controversial when it was introduced — is a possible next step.

The Australian has been told the telcos are prepared to make adjustments to the data they ­normally retain, to enable better contact tracing, but it is understood the government is wary of how this measure would be ­received by the public.

The government’s proposed app, which would help governments map a path for the potential scaling back of strict social-­distancing measures, would work in tandem with ramped-up testing and existing tracing measures.