Stumbling surveillance: the end of the COVIDSafe app

This stood in sharp contrast to the peer-reviewed study, published in Nature, which considered the epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 app developed in the UK. In that case the National Health Service abandoned initial connection methods based on Bluetooth, implementing, instead, Apple and Google's Exposure Notification Framework.

As the critical multi-authored study of COVIDSafe concludes, "Almost all of the serious security bugs, privacy issues, and bugs affecting efficacy that were present could have all been avoided by using the Exposure Notification Framework, keeping public perception high."

A few spluttering apologias can be found in defence of the app. One effort can be found in that dullest of fora, The Conversation. That contribution, sterilised and pasteurised, tries to be optimistic about a profligate, failed exercise. "One of the goals of COVIDSafe was to automate the manual work, to help the efforts of contact tracers at scale. This goal was achieved, although the value and effectiveness are questionable, as we discuss below."

Then comes the following, which suggests a lamentable ignorance of the implications of surveillance. "Getting so many Australians to download new and contested technology is an unparalleled achievement. While the number of downloads doesn't tell us how many people were actively using the app, it shows some success in getting people to at least download and engage with it."

This relish for technological utopia can only take us so far before disgust sets in. The issue for such believers is not how good the effort was, but the fact that it was tried by the unsuspecting. And not only that, "COVIDSafe struck a balance between being aesthetic and relatively easy to use."

In future, those in the business of dolling out such health initiatives should think more carefully. These systems may be intended to keep public trust afloat but can have quite the opposite effect. Ultimately, the proof of COVIDSafe's great demise can be found in the number of individuals who consented to having their data added to the National COVIDSafe Data Store for reasons of contact tracing. While there were 7.9 million registrations of the app between April 2020 and May 2022, fewer than 800 gave consent to that measure. As Australia's current health minister, Mark Butler, opined, the entire endeavour was a monumental waste.