‘Please uninstall COVIDSafe’: App branded a failure and deleted
By Tim Biggs
August 10, 2022 — 12.56pm
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https://www.smh.com.au/technology/please-uninstall-covidsafe-app-branded-a-failure-and-deleted-20220810-p5b8oe.html
The COVIDSafe app introduced by the Morrison government in 2020 has been decommissioned after a Senate select committee branded it an expensive failure and the health minister said state governments hadn’t used it for months.
The app was updated on Tuesday night to remove all its functionality. Users opening the app are now greeted with the message “Please uninstall COVIDSafe”. On Wednesday, Health Minister Mark Butler said the app did little but burn through money.
Health Minister Mark Butler said contact tracers working on the ground were far more effective than the COVIDSafe app.CREDIT:ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
“It is clear this app failed as a public health measure, and that’s why we’ve acted to delete it,” he said. “This failed app was a colossal waste of more than $21 million of taxpayers’ money.”
Butler said while the app had 7.9 million registrations, fewer than 800 users consented to having their data added to the national store. Since its launch in April 2020, the app had identified only two positive cases that were not found by manual contact tracing, he said.
The app was designed to aid contact tracers by determining the people who had been near someone with COVID-19. Morrison had likened COVIDSafe to a sunscreen you need to apply when going outside. But it was an immediate source of controversy.
Technical limitations meant that people using iPhones had to keep the app on their screens and their phones unlocked at all times, prompting concerns for security as well as their phone batteries. After several updates, experts continued to question the efficacy of the Bluetooth-based tracking method — which was shown to work less than half of the time – as well as the government’s decision to decline help from Apple and Google.
Former PM Scott Morrison described COVIDSafe as a way to protect the community against infection.CREDIT:ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
After two months and 6 million downloads, the app had failed to detect any close contacts that hadn’t already been identified by traditional contact tracers. A government report published in July last year disclosed that the app led to only 17 unique close contacts as of May 2021. An evaluation published in the Lancet Public Health journal concluded this caused substantial extra work for contact tracers, without making a meaningful contribution to the COVID response.
As state governments relaxed COVID-19 restrictions in 2021 and moved to QR codes and check-in apps for contact-tracing, the expectation was this technology would integrate somehow with COVIDSafe, but this did not happen.
State-based QR check-in systems became a more effective tool for contact tracing, with a Service NSW spokesperson confirming that check-in numbers remained high despite changed requirements; there were more than 750,000 check-ins in the state during July this year.
According to the Albanese government, the last upload of data to the national COVIDSafe data store was in May 2021, and there has been no access to the data store by state authorities since January 2022.
And yet, the COVIDSafe app continued to operate at an estimated cost to taxpayers of up to $75,000 a month. The app cost more than $10 million in development, $7 million in advertising and marketing, $2.1 million in upkeep and more than $2 million in staff.
In the select committee on COVID-19’s final report in April this year, the app was described as a costly failure.
“By not recognising the app’s faults, or seeking to fix the app, the government has continued to oversee an application which is not fit for its intended purpose, has cost millions of dollars, and offered limited public value,” the report said.
“The committee recommends that the Australian government cease any further expenditure of public funds on the failed COVIDSafe application.”
The government said that, following the app’s deletion, no data from COVIDSafe would be retained.
With Mary Ward and Ben Grubb