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COVIDSafe
COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters between users and later allowing a state or territory health authority to warn a user they have come within 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. The efficacy of the app was questioned over its lifetime, ultimately identifying just 2 confirmed cases by the time it was decommissioned on 16 August 2022.
COVIDSafe first began development in late March, shortly after the Morrison government showed interest in Singapore's TraceTogether app. Development of the app was publicly announced on 14 April 2020, with plans to release it for Android and iOS within a fortnight. The app had a budget of over A$2 million, A$700,000 of which went to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting, development, and support. The announcement was immediately met with concerns over the privacy implications of the app and confusion over its distribution. For many, it was unclear if the app would be a feature of the existing Coronavirus Australia app or completely separate. Adding to the confusion, many news reports used images of Coronavirus Australia in their articles, and the COVIDSafe website linked to the Coronavirus Australia apps for a short time after release.
The app launched on 26 April 2020. However, there were early reports that some users had problems with the sign-up. For example, those who entered their phone number during sign-up received the following message: "Error verifying phone number. Please check your details and try again."
Within 24 hours of COVIDSafe's release it had been downloaded by over a million people, and within 48 hours more than two million. By the second week more than four million users had registered. Despite this, state and territory health authorities were not able to access data collected through the app as the health authority portal had not yet been completed.
Accompanying the release, Peter Dutton, then Minister for Home Affairs, announced new legislation that would make it illegal to coerce one into submitting a contact report, even if a person had already registered with the app and tested positive for COVID-19. A determination, titled Biosecurity Determination 2020, was put in place, with the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 being later introduced on 6 May 2020 to codify it. The legislation further governs how data collected by the app will be stored, submitted and processed.
In early May 2020, the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 held a public hearing on the app, focusing particularly on its effectiveness and privacy implications and the source code for the app was released publicly.
In mid May 2020, the Australian Chief Medical Officer announced that the app was fully functional. The next day it was reported that the app had reached 5.7 million downloads, approximately 23% of Australia's total population. On 20 May 2020, data was accessed for the first time following an outbreak at Kyabram Health in Victoria.
By mid June, over a month since the launch of the app, the app had yet to identify any contacts not already discovered through traditional contact tracing techniques, strengthening growing concerns over the efficacy of the app. Adding to this, some estimates put the likelihood of the app registering a random encounter at just ~4%. Concurrently, the Google/Apple exposure notification framework began rolling out to users, with the Italian Immuni being the first app to make use of it.
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COVIDSafe AI simulator
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COVIDSafe
COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters between users and later allowing a state or territory health authority to warn a user they have come within 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. The efficacy of the app was questioned over its lifetime, ultimately identifying just 2 confirmed cases by the time it was decommissioned on 16 August 2022.
COVIDSafe first began development in late March, shortly after the Morrison government showed interest in Singapore's TraceTogether app. Development of the app was publicly announced on 14 April 2020, with plans to release it for Android and iOS within a fortnight. The app had a budget of over A$2 million, A$700,000 of which went to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting, development, and support. The announcement was immediately met with concerns over the privacy implications of the app and confusion over its distribution. For many, it was unclear if the app would be a feature of the existing Coronavirus Australia app or completely separate. Adding to the confusion, many news reports used images of Coronavirus Australia in their articles, and the COVIDSafe website linked to the Coronavirus Australia apps for a short time after release.
The app launched on 26 April 2020. However, there were early reports that some users had problems with the sign-up. For example, those who entered their phone number during sign-up received the following message: "Error verifying phone number. Please check your details and try again."
Within 24 hours of COVIDSafe's release it had been downloaded by over a million people, and within 48 hours more than two million. By the second week more than four million users had registered. Despite this, state and territory health authorities were not able to access data collected through the app as the health authority portal had not yet been completed.
Accompanying the release, Peter Dutton, then Minister for Home Affairs, announced new legislation that would make it illegal to coerce one into submitting a contact report, even if a person had already registered with the app and tested positive for COVID-19. A determination, titled Biosecurity Determination 2020, was put in place, with the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 being later introduced on 6 May 2020 to codify it. The legislation further governs how data collected by the app will be stored, submitted and processed.
In early May 2020, the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 held a public hearing on the app, focusing particularly on its effectiveness and privacy implications and the source code for the app was released publicly.
In mid May 2020, the Australian Chief Medical Officer announced that the app was fully functional. The next day it was reported that the app had reached 5.7 million downloads, approximately 23% of Australia's total population. On 20 May 2020, data was accessed for the first time following an outbreak at Kyabram Health in Victoria.
By mid June, over a month since the launch of the app, the app had yet to identify any contacts not already discovered through traditional contact tracing techniques, strengthening growing concerns over the efficacy of the app. Adding to this, some estimates put the likelihood of the app registering a random encounter at just ~4%. Concurrently, the Google/Apple exposure notification framework began rolling out to users, with the Italian Immuni being the first app to make use of it.