📚 How Australia's New Contact-Tracing App Tries to Fight Covid-19 While Protecting Privacy

"Australia's coronavirus tracing app, dubbed COVIDSafe, has been released as the nation seeks to contain the spread of the deadly pandemic," reports ABC.net.au: People who download the app will be asked to supply a name, which can be a pseudonym, their age range, a mobile number and post code. Those who download the software will be notified if they have contact with another user who tests positive for coronavirus... Using Bluetooth technology, the app "pings" or exchanges a "digital handshake" with another user when they come within 1.5 metres of each other, and then logs this contact and encrypts it. The data remains encrypted on a user's phone for 21 days, after which it is deleted if they have not been in contact with a confirmed case. The application will have two stages of consent that people will have to agree to: initially when they download the app so data can be collected, and secondly to release that data on their phone if they are diagnosed with the virus. If a person with the app tested positive to COVID-19, and provided they consent to sharing the information, it will be sent to a central server. From here, state and territory health authorities can access it and start contacting other people who might have contracted coronavirus... The app is voluntary and it will be illegal to force anyone to download it. In addition, Australia "will make it illegal for non-health officials to access data collected on smartphone software to trace the spread of the coronavirus," reports Reuters, citing comments Friday by Prime Minister Scott Morrison "amid privacy concerns raised by the measure." Australia has so far avoided the high death toll of other countries, with only 78 deaths, largely as a result of tough restrictions on movement that have brought public life to a standstill. The federal government has said existing "social distancing" measures will remain until at least mid-May, and that its willingness to relax them will depend on whether people download the smartphone "app" to identify who a person with the illness has had contact with... Morrison also confirmed a local media report which said the data would be stored on servers managed by AWS, a unit of U.S. internet giant Amazon.com Inc, but added that "it's a nationally encrypted data store". "The spec for it is very privacy-positive," writes Slashdot reader Bleve97, adding "It will be interesting to see what it looks like once it's been disassembled in a sandbox and played with!" And Slashdot reader betsuin has already installed it (adding that the app "does not require GPS... I've installed, GPS is off on my rooted device."

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