The COVIDSafe app is just another expensive fail

There has been a litany of problems with the Government’s app, leading many to question whether the millions of taxpayer dollars spent has been worth it.

There were initial concerns about the collection and use of data and privacy, and given the great failure that was the 2016 online Census and the widescale privacy breaches associated with My Health Record, these concerns certainly continue.

Then there were the hoax messages that the Australian Federal Police were called to investigate after many users reported receiving a text when they were further than 20 kilometres from home.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that an early version of the app accidentally informed several users that they had ‘tested positive for Covid-19’, causing members of the public to attend testing clinics in an anxious and distressed state, only to find out the app’s information was totally incorrect.

Other documents show that the government was aware in early May 2020 of a range of issues with the Bluetooth beacons, which are used in the app to record close contacts.

These beacons were also interfering with other applications, including glucose monitors for people with diabetes.

The Federal Government maintained that the app has been widely successful, and around 7 million people have downloaded it, meeting the original target of 40% of the population.

Yet as researchers from the University of Melbourne have pointed out, “…by May last year, only 44% of those surveyed had actually downloaded it. Plenty on social media are now saying they’ve all but abandoned COVIDSafe in favour of the QR code check-ins done via, for example, the Victorian government app or the Service NSW app. And when Victoria’s health minister Martin Foley was asked this week whether the COVIDSafe app had been used in responding to the latest outbreak, he said: ‘No. Not to my knowledge, and I’m sure in such a rare event it would have been brought to my attention’.”

Last month, former Labor leader Bill Shorten totted up the cost to the taxpayer, estimating that the program has cost $7,753,863, suggesting that the program will continue to cost $100,000 a month to maintain.

In October last year, AAP took a sterner tone, believing that the app cost the taxpayer a million dollars per each case the app discovered. “$5.2 million has been spent on operational costs and almost $7 million on advertising, taking the total price tag to roughly $16 million. The app has only helped find 17 contacts not found by manual tracers,” they wrote.

A policy paper from the Auckland University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Auckland and Massey University, released in June, CovidSafe is unlikely to help prevent the spread of the virus because its effectiveness is “extremely limited.”

So far, this appears to ring true. Despite what appears to be a handful of small ‘wins’, the app seems to be yet another example of a government-led national technology implementation that has nowhere near lived up to expectations.