Australia’s ‘COVIDSafe App’: An Experiment in Surveillance, Trust and Law

tags

Contact Tracing Privacy Law

Notes

intended to create sufficient public confidence to result in downloads of the app

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reasons why this public confidence is not yet warranted: insufficient transparency; misleading statements by the government about the operation of the app; and flaws in the regulations

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the test this time is not whether the government can simply get away with whatever it pushes through Parliament. It also has to convince the public to continue to ‘vote with their phones’

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Australia’s app can be regarded as more on the centralised side, since it requires decryption at the central server, and particularly given the unrestricted uploading of contacts

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The percentage of mobile phones in a jurisdiction on which it is necessary to have an app installed for it to have a significant effect on contact tracing is, at a minimum, claimed to be 40%. Australian government officials have stated that their aim is at least 50%, and some experts claim that it needs to be 80%

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have instead used apps which (variously) are compulsory to use, are used in combination with compulsory access to geolocation information, or are used in combination with compulsory privacy-invasive access to government registers, credit card information, and other contact-revealing data

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Minister relied on the advice of three officials to be satisfied that the Determination was necessary

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have not been made public

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If this means that only part of the source code for the app will be released, it strains credibility that this would increase trust

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should have been exposed to full Parliamentary scrutiny and debate, and the passage of legislation, before the app was released

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(CLOUD Act) could be used to compel Amazon Web Services (AWS), as a provider of a remote computing service that is subject to US jurisdiction, to disclose the contents of a record to the US government even if the record is located outside the US

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The app collects a far broader amount of data (on ‘bystanders’) than the data which is eventually passed to Contact Tracers, which is where the substantive meaning of ‘proximity’ resides.

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the extent of the interference with privacy posed by the COVIDSafe app is left completely unexplained in its current regulatory instrument, and is in fact left completely to the (changeable) discretion of those who control the app

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The Government Services Minister has repeatedly stated in the media – and the media widely and constantly reported – that COVIDSafe only records contacts with other app users which are within 1.5 metres of the user for at least 15 minutes.

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Neither of these statements is true

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