COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 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 with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. 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.
History COVIDSafe first began development in late March, shortly after the Morrison government showed interest in Singapore's TraceTogether app. Development of the app was publicly announced on 14 April 2020, with plans to release it for Android and iOS within a fortnight. The app had a budget of over , of which went to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting, development, and support. 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. Adding to the confusion, many news reports used images of Coronavirus Australia in their articles, and the COVIDSafe website linked to the Coronavirus Australia apps for a short time after release.
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."
Within 24 hours of COVIDSafe's release it had been downloaded by over a million people, and within 48 hours more than two million. By the second week more than four million users had registered. 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.
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. A determination, titled Biosecurity Determination 2020, was put in place, with the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 being later introduced on 6 May 2020 to codify it. The legislation further governs how data collected by the app will be stored, submitted and processed.
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 and the source code for the app was released publicly.
In mid May 2020, the Australian Chief Medical Officer announced that the app was fully functional. The next day it was reported that the app had reached 5.7 million downloads, approximately 23% of Australia's total population. On 20 May 2020, data was accessed for the first time following an outbreak at Kyabram Health in Victoria.
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, strengthening growing concerns over the efficacy of the app. Adding to this, some estimates put the likelihood of the app registering a random encounter at just ~4%. Concurrently, the Google/Apple exposure notification framework began rolling out to users, with the Italian Immuni being the first app to make use of it.
In late June, following a "second wave" in Victoria sparked by family gatherings, COVIDSafe data was accessed by contact tracers over 90 times. The app, again, was unable to identify undetected transmission. 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. Despite the identification of at least two further cases in attendance, to date no transmission has been found to originate from the protests.
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. 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. Delv was engaged after the initial release of the app to assist with development, and was also the primary developer of the Coronavirus Australia app.
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. ENF is an alternative, entirely incompatible, digital contact tracing protocol considered to be more reliable at detecting contact traces than competing protocols. For the app to take advantage of the framework, either the framework or app would need to be almost completely rewritten.
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. By late October, the app had identified a total of 17 new cases.
By 29 November 2020, the Digital Transformation Agency was reportedly considering incorporating VMWare's Herald protocol to improve performance and detection success rate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, every other state and territory in Australia has their own QR-code based solution: 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, despite the extensive outbreaks and lockdowns that year. In response to the poor performance of the app, Federal Labor Party politicians called for the app to be discontinued, while the Morrison government began engaging with states to find a future use of the app.
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.
Contact tracing
The app is built on the BlueTrace protocol originally developed by the Singaporean Government. A stated priority of the protocol was the preservation of privacy. In accordance with this, personal information is only collected once at the point of registration and subsequently used purely to contact potentially infected patients. 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. 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.
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.
Although the app is commonly described as only logging encounters longer than 15 minutes and closer than , 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.
Reporting centralisation BlueTrace's employment of a centralised reporting architecture has created concerns over its privacy implications. 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. 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. Clients then check these tokens against their local contact logs to determine if they have come in contact with an infected patient. 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. Decentralised reporting protocols are also less mature than their centralised counterparts.
Protocol change to Exposure Notification During the 6 May 2020 Senate Select Committee public hearing on COVID-19 and the COVIDSafe app, 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). The change was proposed to resolve the outstanding issues related to performance of third-party protocols on iOS devices. Unlike BlueTrace, the Exposure Notification frameworks runs at the operating system level with special privileges not available to any third-party frameworks. The adoption of the framework is endorsed by multiple technology experts.