India releases data-use protocols for its contact-tracing app… after five weeks and 100 million downloads
India’s government has released the protocol for using data gathered by its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app, weeks after its April 2nd release and after it was downloaded almost 100 million times.
The legislation underpinning Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app makes it possible to demand that visitors to private homes install the app before entry.
Your ‘don’t do what donny don’t does’ pull quote of choice is…
“Data may be fully anonymised for public health planning, research or statistical purposes, if those purposes can be achieved without the use of personal data. Otherwise, data may be linked […] with such additional protection that is required as an output of data protection impact assessment.”
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NHS contact tracing app isn’t really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we’re not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?
But the implementation and design of this app (created by the NHS’s digital arm, NHSX, in conjunction with VMWare Inc and Zuhlke Engineering) has raised concerns about privacy and efficacy, culminating with allegations that users are not actually anonymous.
Anonymity has a very precise definition under the prevailing legislation, including the European General Data Protection Regulations, and it’s unclear whether the current implementation meets that standard. This is due to the app’s practice of pinpointing phones with specific identifiers.
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Fuck sake. Again, this is a keystone cops level of competence and they want to create a central database of confidential health info.
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Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps
Harriet Harman, chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Human Rights and former Labour Deputy Leader, has redoubled calls on the British government to ensure any COVID-19 contact-tracing app sufficiently protects users’ privacy.
UK’s Ministry of Defence: We’ll harvest and anonymise private COVID-19 apps’ tracing data by handing it to ‘behavioural science’ arm
Analysis Worried about identifiable personal data from your coronavirus contact-tracing app making it into a British government database? Fear not! The Ministry of Defence is sanitising it all first.
The bizarre and not-particularly-reassuring pledge came from the MoD last night as it announced that one of its units, called jHub, would be “facilitating the secure transfer of relevant symptom and epidemiology data from the third party COVID-19 apps to the NHSx datastore.”
Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps
Analysis Apple and Google have officially released their Exposure Notification API, a joint technology project to allows public health organizations to build mobile apps capable of efficient and anonymous coronavirus contact tracing via Bluetooth.
The basic idea is that you run one of these apps on your phone, and the software uses the Apple-Google-developed interface to communicate with copies of itself on other people’s nearby devices over Bluetooth. When someone declares, via the app, that they’ve likely or certainly caught the COVID-19 bio-nasty, all phones that have been in the vicinity of that person’s handheld will find out, alerting their owners that they may have been exposed to the virus. Each country or region is expected to have its own app. No data goes to Apple or Google.
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Campaign groups warn GCHQ can re-identify UK’s phones from COVID-19 contact-tracing app data
Campaign groups have written to the UK Prime Minister warning GCHQ and its digital arm, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) will have the capacity to re-identify the phones of people who have installed the COVID-19 contact-tracing app.
In an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson [PDF], the groups say the current proposal for the app risk a drift toward a surveillance state. Groups who signed the missive include tech justice nonprofit Foxglove and digital rights campaigners Access Now.
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India makes contact-tracing app mandatory for passengers as domestic flights resume
The Indian government has made its Aarogya Setu COVID-19 tracing app mandatory for all air passengers on domestic flights.
The nation yesterday announced domestic flights will resume after a two-month plague-pause with passengers subject to new guidelines [PDF] that include use of the app.
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Oh good. Now that makes me feel much better.
One of China’s major tech hubs is planning to make a health and movement tracking system developed to fight the COVID-19 epidemic a permanent fixture in daily life.
Officials in the city of Hangzhou, home to Alibaba and other Chinese tech concernts, said on Friday (Chinese language) the local government wishes to create creating a permanent version the country’s tracing app that was designed to help lift the country out of lockdown. The proposed system would be a “‘firewall’ to enhance people’s health and immunity” after the pandemic, the city’s health commission said.
The app, which is mandatory, gives users green, yellow, or red status based on their travel history and whether they have been in contact with known cases.
India said its coronavirus contact-tracing app is perfect… adds bug bounty and open-sources it anyway
India has open-sourced its Aarogya Setu contact-tracing app and announced a bug bounty programme to detect any security issues.
Aarogya Setu – which translates to English as “path to health” – has now been downloaded over 110 million times. Unlike many comparable apps around the world, Aarogya Setu tracks users’ locations and its source code – for both apps and back-end – remained secret. However, that stance could not prevent partial decompilation of the Android APK, which led to some reports of vulnerabilities.
Switzerland ‘first’ country to roll out contact-tracing app using Apple-Google APIs to track coronavirus spread
Switzerland says it is the first country to roll out a contact-tracing app for the COVID-19 coronavirus using technology and a set of APIs produced jointly by Apple and Google.
The launch – which is admittedly, for now, limited to a pilot group of essential workers in the country – comes well before the UK is due to widely release its own version of a similar app that has proven controversial regarding privacy and technological concerns.
Singapore to distribute wearable contact-tracing device and won’t rule out making it compulsory
Singapore will introduce a wearable device to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and the minister responsible won’t rule out making it compulsory.
