COVIDSafe

Last updated

COVIDSafe
Developer(s)
Initial release26 April 2020;4 years ago (2020-04-26)
Final release
2.9 / 10 December 2021;2 years ago (2021-12-10)
Repository
Written in
Operating system Android, iOS
Platform Amazon Web Services [6]
Size
  • 5.9 MB (Android)
  • 5.7 MB (iOS)
Standard(s)
Available inEnglish
Type Digital contact tracing
Licence Proprietary, source code released [12] [13]
Website www.covidsafe.gov.au

COVIDSafe [14] [15] was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 [16] [17] to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. [18] 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. [19] To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, [20] [21] to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. [22] 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. [23]

Contents

History

COVIDSafe first began development in late March, shortly after the Morrison government showed interest in Singapore's TraceTogether app. [24] Development of the app was publicly announced on 14 April 2020, [18] with plans to release it for Android and iOS within a fortnight. [25] 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. [26] 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. [27] [28] Adding to the confusion, many news reports used images of Coronavirus Australia in their articles, [29] [30] and the COVIDSafe website linked to the Coronavirus Australia apps for a short time after release. [31]

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." [32]

Within 24 hours of COVIDSafe's release it had been downloaded by over a million people, [33] and within 48 hours more than two million. [34] By the second week more than four million users had registered. [35] 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. [36]

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. [37] [38] A determination, titled Biosecurity Determination 2020, [39] was put in place, with the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 being later introduced on 6 May 2020 to codify it. [40] [41] [42] The legislation further governs how data collected by the app will be stored, submitted and processed. [39]

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 [43] [1] [2] and the source code for the app was released publicly. [44] [45]

In mid May 2020, the Australian Chief Medical Officer announced that the app was fully functional. [46] The next day it was reported that the app had reached 5.7 million downloads, approximately 23% of Australia's total population. [47] [48] On 20 May 2020, data was accessed for the first time [49] [50] following an outbreak at Kyabram Health in Victoria. [51]

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, [52] [53] [54] strengthening growing concerns over the efficacy of the app. [55] [56] Adding to this, some estimates put the likelihood of the app registering a random encounter at just ~4%. [57] [58] [59] Concurrently, the Google/Apple exposure notification framework began rolling out to users, [60] with the Italian Immuni being the first app to make use of it. [61] [62]

In late June, following a "second wave" in Victoria sparked by family gatherings, [63] [64] [65] COVIDSafe data was accessed by contact tracers over 90 times. [66] [67] The app, again, was unable to identify undetected transmission. [68] At the same time, a COVID-19 positive protester who attended the Melbourne Black Lives Matter rally on 6 June 2020 was criticised in the media for having not downloaded the app. [69] [70] [71] Despite the identification of at least two further cases in attendance, [72] to date no transmission has been found to originate from the protests. [73] [74] [75]

On 20 July 2020, the government was criticised for contracting out part of the app's development and support to a company with ties to the Liberal Party. [76] Mina Zaki, the wife of the CEO of Delv Pty Ltd, was a Liberal Party candidate for the federal seat of Canberra in the 2019 election. [77] Delv was engaged after the initial release of the app to assist with development, [1] :2:54:00 and was also the primary developer of the Coronavirus Australia app. [78]

In a 22 July 2020 Sky News interview, Minister for Government Services Stewart Robert blamed the failure of COVIDSafe on the unwillingness of Apple and Google to modify their existing, globally deployed, Exposure Notification framework (ENF) to work with the app. [79] [80] ENF is an alternative, entirely incompatible, digital contact tracing protocol considered to be more reliable [81] [82] [83] at detecting contact traces than competing protocols. [84] [85] For the app to take advantage of the framework, either the framework or app would need to be almost completely rewritten. [86] [87]

On 1 August 2020, NSW Health announced the app had helped them trace new contacts. They accessed the app data on a coronavirus case and identified 544 additional people, two of whom tested positive to COVID-19. [88] By late October, the app had identified a total of 17 new cases. [89]

By 29 November 2020, the Digital Transformation Agency was reportedly considering incorporating VMWare's Herald protocol to improve performance and detection success rate. [8] [9] [10]

On 19 December 2020, the Digital Transformation Agency announced the app had been updated to incorporate VMWare's Herald protocol, to improve app performance. The update reportedly helps address situations where communication between devices might fail, such as when the device is locked or the app is running in the background. [11]

On 2 February 2021, the Digital Transformation Agency announced a new update enabling the app to display state and territory COVID-19 case statistics. The update reportedly allowed users to change their registration postcode from within the app, which previously required reinstallation. [90]

It was announced on 26 February 2021 that the app had been updated to feature state and territory restrictions, as well as improving battery consumption on Android devices. [91]

Because of the ongoing technical problems surrounding the COVIDSafe app, the Victorian government developed the Service Victoria QR Code app to augment tracing efforts within the state. Use of the app is mandatory for all Victorian businesses, organisations, clubs and events. [92]

Similarly, every other state and territory in Australia has their own QR-code based solution:[ citation needed ]

On 2 December 2021, NSW and Victorian health officials admitted to The Guardian that the data collected by the app had not been used a single time in 2021, [93] despite the extensive outbreaks and lockdowns that year. [94] In response to the poor performance of the app, Federal Labor Party politicians called for the app to be discontinued, [95] while the Morrison government began engaging with states to find a future use of the app. [93]

On 16 August 2022, the incumbent Albanese Government decommissioned the app, shutting down remaining infrastructure and removing it from Google Play and the Apple App Store. The total cost of the app over its lifetime rounded out to $21 million, with $10 million going to development costs alone. [23]

Contact tracing

The app is built on the BlueTrace protocol originally developed by the Singaporean Government. [96] A stated priority of the protocol was the preservation of privacy. [97] [98] In accordance with this, personal information is only collected once at the point of registration and subsequently used purely to contact potentially infected patients. [99] Additionally, users are able to opt out at any time, clearing all personal information. The contact tracing mechanism is executed locally on an individual's device using Bluetooth, storing all encounters in a contact history log chronicling contact for the past 21 days. [100] Users in contact logs are identified using anonymous time-shifting "temporary IDs" issued by a central Department of Health (DoH) server. Consequently, a user's identity and contact patterns cannot be determined by anyone not authorised by the DoH. Furthermore, since temporary IDs change on a regular basis, malicious third parties cannot track users by observing log entries over time. [2] :02:51:10

Once a user tests positive for infection, the DoH requests their contact log. If consent is given, the logs are transmitted to a central server where temporary IDs are matched with contact information. Health authorities are not able to access log entries about foreign users, so those entries are sent to the appropriate health authority to be processed domestically. Once a contact has been identified, the DoH contacts the individual. [101]

Although the app is commonly described as only logging encounters longer than 15 minutes and closer than 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in), [102] [103] the app actually indiscriminately logs most encounters. It is only once the health authority receives a contact log that it is filtered to encounters within those parameters. [2] :02:51:15,02:52:40 [104]

Reporting centralisation

BlueTrace's employment of a centralised reporting architecture has created concerns over its privacy implications. [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] [110] Under a centralised report processing protocol, a user must upload their entire contact log to a health authority administered server, where the health authority is then responsible for matching the log entries to contact details, ascertaining potential contact, and ultimately warning users of potential contact. [101] In contrast, the Exposure Notification framework and other decentralised reporting protocols, while still having a central reporting server, delegate the responsibility of processing logs to clients on the network. Instead of a client uploading their contact history, it uploads a number from which encounter tokens can be derived by individually. [111] Clients then check these tokens against their local contact logs to determine if they have come in contact with an infected patient. [112] Inherent in the fact the protocol never allows the government access to contact logs, this approach has major privacy benefits. However, this method also presents some issues, primarily the lack of human in the loop reporting, leading to a higher occurrence of false positives. [113] [101] Decentralised reporting protocols are also less mature than their centralised counterparts. [96] [114] [112]

BlueTrace overview.svg
An overview of how different parties interact under a centralised protocol
Exposure Notification Framework overview.svg
An overview of how different parties interact under a decentralised protocol

Protocol change to Exposure Notification

During the 6 May 2020 Senate Select Committee public hearing on COVID-19 and the COVIDSafe app, [43] the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) announced they were looking into transitioning the protocol from BlueTrace to the Google and Apple developed Exposure Notification framework (ENF). [115] The change was proposed to resolve the outstanding issues related to performance of third-party protocols on iOS devices. [116] [2] [115] [117] Unlike BlueTrace, the Exposure Notification frameworks runs at the operating system level with special privileges not available to any third-party frameworks. [84] [85] The adoption of the framework is endorsed by multiple technology experts. [118] [119] [120]

Transitioning from BlueTrace to ENF presented several issues, most notably that, as the app cannot run both protocols simultaneously, [121] any protocol change would be a hard cut between versions. This would result in the app no longer functioning for any users who had not yet updated to the ENF version of the app. Additionally, the two protocols are almost completely incompatible, [87] [86] meaning the vast majority - all but the UI - of the COVIDSafe app would have to be redeveloped. Similarly, because of the change from a centralised reporting mechanism to a decentralised one, very little of the existing server software would be usable. [122] The role of state and territory health authorities in the process would also change significantly, as they would no longer be responsible for determining and contacting encounters. [122] This change would involve retraining health officials and penning new agreements with states and territories.[ citation needed ]

Up until at least 18 June 2020, the DTA was experimenting with ENF, [123] however in an interview with The Project held on 28 June 2020, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth stated COVIDSafe would "absolutely not" transition to ENF. [124] He reasoned the government would never transition to any contact tracing solution without human-in-the-loop reporting, [125] [126] something that no decentralised protocol can support.

Issues

Issues on iOS

Versions 1.0 and 1.1 of COVIDSafe for iOS did not scan for other devices when the application was placed in the background, resulting in far fewer recorded contacts than was possible. This was later corrected in version 1.2. [127] Additionally, until the 18 June 2020 update, a bug existed where locked iOS devices were unable to fetch new temporary IDs. [128] Devices collected 24–48 hour pools of temporary IDs in advance, meaning a device could easily exhaust it's pool unless the phone was unlocked specifically when the app was scheduled to replenish the pool.[ citation needed ]

Additionally, all third-party digital contact tracing protocols experience degraded performance on iOS devices, [129] [101] particularly when the device is locked or the app is not in the foreground. [130] [131] This is a characteristic of the operating system, stemming from how iOS manages its battery life and resource priority. [132] :01:19:30 The Android app does not experience these issues because Android is more permissive with background services and the app can request the operating system to disable battery optimisation. [133] [132] :01:22:00

Country calling code restrictions

COVIDSafe requires an Australia mobile number to register, meaning foreigners in Australia need a local SIM card. [134] Initially, residents of Norfolk Island, an external territory of Australia, were unable to register with the app as they used a different country code to mainland Australia, +672 instead of +61. [135] [136] [137] The Australian government released an update resolving the issue on 18 June 2020. [128] [138]

Privacy concerns

Upon announcement, the app was immediately met with widespread criticism over the potential privacy implications of tracking users. [139] [140] While some criticism was attributed to poor communication, [141] [142] fears were further stoked when Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly refused to rule out the possibility of making the app compulsory, with Morrison stating the next day it would not be mandatory to download the app. [143] [144] [145] Additionally, several privacy watchdogs raised concerns over the data collected by the app, and the potential for the centralised reporting server to become a target for hackers. [146] [147] [148] To address concerns, the Attorney General launched an investigation into the app to ensure it had proper privacy controls and was sufficiently secure. [149] The Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, also announced special legislation to protect data collected through the app. [37] The app was supposed to be source available to allow it to be audited and analysed by the public, [150] however, this was delayed [151] until a review by the Australian Signals Directorate had been completed. [152] On 8 May 2020, the source code was released. [44]

Issue was also taken with the fact the backend of the app runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, [153] meaning the US Government could potentially seize the data of Australian citizens. [6] Data is currently stored within Australia [154] in the AWS Sydney region data centres. [155] In a public hearing on COVIDSafe, Randall Brugeaud, CEO of the Digital Transformation Agency, explained that the decision to use AWS over purely Australian owned cloud providers was done on the basis of familiarity, scalability, and resource availability within AWS. [2] :01:49:00 - 02:10:00,02:52:01 - 03:05:00 The AWS contract was also drawn from a whole of government arrangement. [2] :02:59:30

Following the global rollout of the Google and Apple developed Exposure Notification Framework (ENF) in late June 2020, [156] public concerns were raised that the government or the companies were tracking users without their knowledge or consent. [157] [158] [159] [160] These claims are false, as COVIDSafe and ENF are completely incompatible, and ENF is disabled until a compatible app is installed and explicit user consent is given. [161] Even if a third party were to obtain the encounter log of a user, no persons could be identified without also holding the logs of other users the client has encountered. [162]

Australia's Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security reported that several of Australia's intelligence and security agencies collected data from COVIDSafe in its first months of operation. The report does not state which specific agencies collected the data and whether or not it was decrypted. [163]

In June 2021 the state government of Western Australia "was forced to introduce legislation" when Western Australian police used data collected by the COVID SafeWA app for purposes other than contact tracing. [164] [165] [166] Police stated that their use of this data was lawful, and that they could not stop using this data in criminal investigations while lawful to do so. Police Commissioner Chris Dawson defended this by pointing out that the "terms and conditions stated data could be accessed for a lawful reason" and while he accepts "people don't always read fine print on insurance policies or whatever," their use of the data in these circumstances was lawful. [164]

Attorney General privacy impact assessment

On 25 May 2020, the Attorney General report and subsequent response by the Department of Health was released, [152] the following recommendations were made:

In the Department of Health's response, they agreed to all suggestions with exception to "rectification of personal information". Rather than building a process to do so, a user could uninstall and reinstall the app to change their personal information. [152] :p. 7 A process to formally correct information was to be introduced later.

Independent analysis

On 29 May 2020, a group of independent security researchers including Troy Hunt, Kate Carruthers, Matthew Robbins, and Geoffrey Huntley released an informal report raising a number of issues discovered in the decompiled app. [167] [132] [168] Their primary concerns were two flaws in the implementation of the protocol that could potentially allow malicious third parties to ascertain static identifiers for individual clients. [169] Importantly, all issues raised in the report were related to incidental leaking of static identifiers during the encounter handshake. [167] To date, no code has been found that intentionally tracks the user beyond the scope of contact tracing, nor code that transmits a user's encounter history to third parties without the explicit consent of the user. [132] [170] [171] Additionally, despite the flaws discovered through their analysis, many prominent security researchers publicly endorse the app. [172] [173] [174] [175]

The first issue was located in BLEAdvertiser.kt, the class responsible for advertising to other BlueTrace clients. The bug occurred with a supposedly random, regularly changing three-byte string included in that was, in fact, static for the entire lifetime of an app instance. [176] [167] :Issue #2 [177] :line 85–86 This string was included with all handshakes performed by the client. In OpenTrace this issue did not occur, as value changes every 180 seconds. [178] While likely not enough entropy to identify individual clients, especially in a densely populated area, when used in combination with other static identifiers (such as the phone's model) it could have been used by malicious actors to determine the identity of users. [167] [168] This issue was addressed in the 13 May 2020 update. [179]

The second issue was located in GattServer.kt, the class responsible for managing BLE peripheral mode, where the cached read payload is incorrectly cleared. Although it functioned normally when a handshake succeeded, a remote client who broke the handshake would have received the same TempID for all future handshakes until one succeeded, regardless of time. [167] :Issue #1 This meant a malicious actor could always intentionally break the handshake and, for the lifetime of the app instance, the same TempID would always be returned to them. This issue was resolved in OpenTrace, [180] yet was unfixed in COVIDSafe [169] [181] until the 2020-05-13 update. [179]

Other issues more inherent to the protocol include the transmission of device model as part of the encounter payload, and issues where static device identifiers could be returned when running in GATT mode. [167] Many of these are unfixable without redesigning the protocol, however they, like the other issues, pose no major privacy or security concerns to users. [168]

Legislation

The Biosecurity Determination 2020, made with the authority of the Biosecurity Act 2015, [182] [183] governs how data collected by the COVIDSafe app is stored, submitted, and processed. Later a separate bill was introduced to codify this determination, the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020. [41] [42] The determination and bill makes it illegal for anyone to access COVIDSafe app data without both the consent of the device owner [39] :§7.1 and being an employee or contractor of a state or territory health authority. [39] :§6.2 Collected data may be used only for the purpose of contact tracing or anonymous statistical analysis, [39] :§6.2.a.ii & §6.2.e [184] and data also cannot be stored on servers residing outside Australia, nor can it be disclosed to persons outside Australia. [39] :§7.3 [185] Additionally, all data must be destroyed once the pandemic has concluded, overriding any other legislation requiring data to be retained for a certain period of time. [39] :§7.5 The bill also ensures no entity may compel someone to install the app. [39] :§9 [186] Despite this there have been reports of multiple businesses attempting to require employees to use the app. [187] [188]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID-19 apps</span> Mobile apps designed to aid contact tracing

COVID-19 apps include mobile-software applications for digital contact-tracing—i.e. the process of identifying persons ("contacts") who may have been in contact with an infected individual—deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coronavirus Australia</span> App released by the Australian Government

Coronavirus Australia was an app released by the Australian Government designed to allow users to access information about the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. The app was released by the Department of Health on 29 March 2020, and decommissioned two years later on 31 August 2022. Over its lifetime, the app was downloaded over a million times and was initially ranked first in the Apple App Store's "Health and Fitness" category. Due to the short development period of two weeks, the app initially served primarily as an aggregate of links to official government websites. Shortly after an update was released adding a voluntary "isolation registration" form that collected the location, name, age, mobile phone number, isolation start date, and various other details about users who were self isolating.

Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT/PEPP) is a full-stack open protocol designed to facilitate digital contact tracing of infected participants. The protocol was developed in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The protocol, like the competing Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) protocol, makes use of Bluetooth LE to discover and locally log clients near a user. However, unlike DP-3T, it uses a centralized reporting server to process contact logs and individually notify clients of potential contact with an infected patient. It has been argued that this approaches compromises privacy, but has the benefit of human-in-the-loop checks and health authority verification. While users are not expected to register with their real name, the back-end server processes pseudonymous personal data that would eventually be capable of being reidentified. It has also been put forward that the distinction between centralized/decentralized systems is mostly technical and PEPP-PT is equally able to preserve privacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BlueTrace</span> COVID-19 contact tracing software

BlueTrace is an open-source application protocol that facilitates digital contact tracing of users to stem the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially developed by the Singaporean Government, BlueTrace powers the contact tracing for the TraceTogether app. Australia and the United Arab Emirates have already adopted the protocol in their gov apps, and other countries were considering BlueTrace for adoption. A principle of the protocol is the preservation of privacy and health authority co-operation.

TraceTogether was a digital system implemented by the Government of Singapore to facilitate contact tracing efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. The main goal was a quick identification of persons who may have come into close contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19. The system helps in identifying contacts such as strangers encountered in public one would not otherwise be able to identify or remember. Together with SafeEntry, it allows the identification of specific locations where a spread between close contacts may occur.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exposure Notification</span> Initiative for mobile device-based privacy-preserving contact tracing

The (Google/Apple) Exposure Notification System (GAEN) is a framework and protocol specification developed by Apple Inc. and Google to facilitate digital contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. When used by health authorities, it augments more traditional contact tracing techniques by automatically logging close approaches among notification system users using Android or iOS smartphones. Exposure Notification is a decentralized reporting protocol built on a combination of Bluetooth Low Energy technology and privacy-preserving cryptography. It is an opt-in feature within COVID-19 apps developed and published by authorized health authorities. Unveiled on April 10, 2020, it was made available on iOS on May 20, 2020 as part of the iOS 13.5 update and on December 14, 2020 as part of the iOS 12.5 update for older iPhones. On Android, it was added to devices via a Google Play Services update, supporting all versions since Android Marshmallow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TCN Protocol</span> Proximity contact tracing protocol

The Temporary Contact Numbers Protocol, or TCN Protocol, is an open source, decentralized, anonymous exposure alert protocol developed by Covid Watch in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Covid Watch team, started as an independent research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of Waterloo was the first in the world to publish a white paper, develop, and open source fully anonymous Bluetooth exposure alert technology in collaboration with CoEpi after writing a blog post on the topic in early March.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital contact tracing</span> Method of contact tracing using mobile devices

Digital contact tracing is a method of contact tracing relying on tracking systems, most often based on mobile devices, to determine contact between an infected patient and a user. It came to public prominence in the form of COVID-19 apps during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the initial outbreak, many groups have developed nonstandard protocols designed to allow for wide-scale digital contact tracing, most notably BlueTrace and Exposure Notification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing</span> Proximity contact tracing protocol

Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing is an open protocol developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate digital contact tracing of infected participants. The protocol, like competing protocol Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), uses Bluetooth Low Energy to track and log encounters with other users. The protocols differ in their reporting mechanism, with PEPP-PT requiring clients to upload contact logs to a central reporting server, whereas with DP-3T, the central reporting server never has access to contact logs nor is it responsible for processing and informing clients of contact. Because contact logs are never transmitted to third parties, it has major privacy benefits over the PEPP-PT approach; however, this comes at the cost of requiring more computing power on the client side to process infection reports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NHS COVID-19</span> UK contact tracing app for COVID-19

NHS COVID-19 was a voluntary contact tracing app for monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales, in use from 24 September 2020 until 27 April 2023. It was available for Android and iOS smartphones, and could be used by anyone aged 16 or over.

On April 16, 2020, Nodle released The Whisper Tracing Protocol white paper and the Coalition App on Android. The protocol is intended to be a privacy first Digital contact tracing tool developed for the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The project has been spun off into The Coalition Foundation. The protocol is being used for the Government of Senegal's Daancovid19 mobile contact tracing app initiative. Daancovid19 is the Senegalese digital response against the coronavirus. It was started by a handful of digital professionals and subsequently brought together nearly 500 volunteer experts from the private, public, and civil society. The respective Coalition App has been promoted by the City of Berkeley, California to their residents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NZ COVID Tracer</span> Mobile software application

NZ COVID Tracer is a mobile software application that enables a person to record places they have visited, in order to facilitate tracing who may have been in contact with a person infected with the COVID-19 virus. The app allows users to scan official QR codes at the premises of businesses and other organisations they visit, to create a digital diary. It was launched by New Zealand's Ministry of Health on 20 May 2020, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Covid Watch</span> Open source nonprofit founded in February 2020

Covid Watch was an open source nonprofit founded in February 2020 with the mission of building mobile technology to fight the COVID-19 pandemic while defending digital privacy. The Covid Watch founders became concerned about emerging, mass surveillance-enabling digital contact tracing technology and started the project to help preserve civil liberties during the pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID Alert</span> Canadian contact-tracing app for COVID-19

COVID Alert was the Exposure Notification service app for the country of Canada. It launched in the province of Ontario on July 31, 2020, and became available in nearly all Canadian provinces by October of that year, excluding Alberta, and British Columbia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID Tracker Ireland</span> Contact tracing application released by the Government of Ireland on 7 July 2020

COVID Tracker Ireland is a digital contact tracing app released by the Irish Government and the Health Service Executive on 7 July 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Ireland. The app uses ENS and Bluetooth technology to determine whether a user have been a close contact of someone for more than 15 minutes who tested positive for COVID-19. On 8 July, the app reached one million registered users within 36 hours after its launch, representing more than 30% of the population of Ireland and over a quarter of all smartphone users in the country. As of August 2021, over 3,030,000 people have downloaded the app.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PathCheck</span> American nonprofit organization

PathCheck Foundation is a volunteer-led nonprofit organization founded in February 2020 at MIT that develops COVID-19 apps for digital contact tracing. The organization consists of over 1000 volunteers. In addition, various companies donate employee time to the foundation. The organization was previously known as COVID Safe Paths but was renamed PathCheck Foundation on June 28, 2020.

Software for COVID-19 pandemic mitigation takes many forms. It includes mobile apps for contact tracing and notifications about infection risks, vaccine passports, software for enabling – or improving the effectiveness of – lockdowns and social distancing, Web software for the creation of related information services, and research and development software. A common issue is that few apps interoperate, reducing their effectiveness.

StaySafe.ph or Stay Safe is a digital contact tracing app launched by the Philippine government as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. The mobile app was developed and published by MultiSys Technologies Corporation.

SM-COVID-19 is a proprietary general-purpose digital contact tracing application that utilizes a centralized approach for COVID-19 contact tracing.

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