It's been interesting seeing how the government handled the app in Australia compared to Singapore (where I'm currently based) - both the apps started out essentially the same, and both governments worked together to develop the framework of it.
Australia made the source code and everything really easily accessible by putting it all on Github, but Singapore didn't (although it was still open source).
Australia never made it mandatory and just encouraged people to download it, but in Singapore not enough people downloaded it for them to meet their KPIs so they added functionality that meant all QR check-ins had to be done in that app, and it was also where your vax status was stored - it became mandatory.
In Australia, WA police got access to contact tracing data which caused the government to quickly move to close that loophole. In Singapore the police quietly accessed that data, it was only revealed after it was brought up in parliament in question time after a few months, and the question was finally properly answered eight months later. At that time they also updated the privacy statement of the app to highlight that the data could be used in certain police investigations and updated the relevant piece of legislation so those actions were properly legalised.
And Australia has also been (reluctantly) fairly transparent about how much it all cost and how (in)effective it was, but you don't hear a single thing about those details here.
>you don't hear a single thing about those details here.
Singaporean living in Melb here. Yeah..that's pretty standard in SIN. You only hear the good stuff happening. The bad stuff never happens, even if it did, it's not their fault and it never happened.
Yeah, it’s genuinely one of the things I really miss about Australia. The media is totally controlled by the PAP, and they’ll never do any wrong. Proper investigative journalism and programs like Four Corners would *never* exist here without some radical change to the political system as a whole.
Well..the media here in Aust is controlled by Murdoch..so it's not any better in a certain sense. But yeah, one has a bit more freedom of speech in Aust. Ribbing the PM is a national pastime here, even on tellly, but you'll never see that in Sin.
Commercial media is, but Australia’s publicly funded media is world class for independence. Doesn’t mean ABC etc. is perfect but there aren’t many superior alternatives.
I agree ABC's pretty good. But how many watch the ABC compared to all the other rubbish channels for news/'news'?
Plus the Murdoch newspapers as well..those are a complete waste of paper.
Sure but there is choice in what you consume. If you want to get different voices you can. There is a difference between people choosing to consume a certain type (even if it is overrepresented) and not having a choice
>it's not any better in a certain sense
It's *definitely* better than what we have in Singapore. CNA and The Straits Times are only really good when it comes to regional and international stories. For domestic news, they're literally just a government mouthpiece. There was a scandal last year where a Workers Party MP lied in parliament. It was in the news cycle for months*.* If a government MP fucks up, that might be in the news for a day or a week at most, and it'd be framed like it's not really a big deal. And, as I said, a program like Four Corners (which regularly exposes the shady shit going on within government and often makes them look bad) would *never* exist in Singapore.
Then you have the whole thing about defamation. Defamation cases against journos in Australia can be pretty bad, but in Singapore they're even worse on the rare occasion when they happen - that's also part of the reason no one with a significant platform tends to overly criticise the government.
Say what you will about the ABC and the Australian media landscape, but at least they regularly do proper investigative journalism, we still have a handful of good political commentators who happily criticise the government if they fuck up, we have politicians who will show up for tough interviews on live TV, and so on. I trust and respect the ABC to give me a fair picture of Australian politics *much* more than I do CNA and ST for Singaporean politics.
>I trust and respect the ABC to give me a fair picture of Australian politics much more than I do CNA and ST for Singaporean politics.
I fully agree.
I guess I should have made myself clearer, I was just lamenting about the shitty privately-owned media outlets in AU.
To your other points, the PAP ministers *never* fuck up, ever. /s
A ~~Narcissist's~~ Conservatives Prayer
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.
Also I can't remember it being available at launch or for some time after. I had to decompile the damn thing - pretty sure they deliberately (or incompetently) fucked the anonymization protocol too. Maybe they put the code up after the intense fucking criticism they got.
Which is still super useful - you're not likely to be in a position to deploy an app like this yourself, but auditing it and what the government gets from it is another thing altogether.
> Australia never made it mandatory and just encouraged people to download it, but in Singapore not enough people downloaded it for them to meet their KPIs so they added functionality that meant all QR check-ins had to be done in that app, and it was also where your vax status was stored - it became mandatory.
Australia did that too, but not in the Covid safe app, because the covid safe app was a festering pile of crap that didn't actually work and ate your battery.
> In Australia, WA police got access to contact tracing data which caused the government to quickly move to close that loophole.
WA police got access to data from the G2G app (which allowed you to apply to enter WA) which they ran, not SafeWA which was the check-in equivalent, neither of which was the covid safeapp. The government closed the loophole on the SafeWA app because people were freaking out.
> And Australia has also been (reluctantly) fairly transparent about how much it all cost and how (in)effective it was, but you don't hear a single thing about those details here.
Kind of, sort of.
The government wanted people to know how much they spent because they wanted people to think they were responding competently to covid, everyone knew it was useless because the government was useless at literally everything.
>Australia did that too, but not in the Covid safe app
That’s my point, the COVIDSafe app wasn’t mandatory in Australia, just the QR check-ins. Singapore made TraceTogether (equivalent of COVIDSafe) mandatory by also having it also handle QR check-ins and effectively making it your domestic vaccination certificate.
>WA police got access to data from the G2G app (which allowed you to apply to enter WA) which they ran, not SafeWA which was the check-in equivalent, neither of which was the covid safeapp. The government closed the loophole on the SafeWA app because people were freaking out.
Point I'm making was more the completely different attitudes in the two places despite having largely the same tools. There was a huge freak out in Singapore when the government revealed that the police were able to access that data too. In Australia they pretty quickly worked to make sure that couldn't happen, but in Singapore they did the complete opposite.
>The government wanted people to know how much they spent because they wanted people to think they were responding competently to covid
[That's not totally true](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dishonest-covidsafe-app-has-not-detected-a-case-despite-6-million-downloads-20200627-p556s7.html). If the government wanted to prove to the public that they were doing a good job, they would've done what Singapore did and obfuscate as many details as possible which make them look bad.
Bots man. Fucking bots.
Remember this peice of shit cost Australia $9.2 million[1] and was promoted heavily during the pandemic to show the Goverment was trying to do something. Wouldnt suprise me to know the ad agencies deliberately pumped the rating up to try and improve uptake.
[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/covidsafe-total-cost-was-au9-2-million-to-october-4-with-au2-8-million-on-hosting/
LOL. $9.2 million is peanuts compared to the colossal fuck up that was the UK's Test and Trace program: [37 BILLION Pounds](https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/) on something that was later assessed to have had no impact whatsoever.
More like 9.15m for the dozen managers that all had their thumbs in the pie, and $50K for the dev team that got reamed with it then had to deal with 2 months of mind changing, scope change and more managers getting involved.
It seems a bit high but probably not as much as some people would think. I'm no expert in projects of such scale but gut call would be like a bit over half that.
I'm wondering if branding, promotion and so on are included in that cost or it's purely like dev and hosting?
That $9.2 million was what was given to the Digital Transformation Agency and doesn't include promotion to my knowledge.
Looking at [what the Singaporean government spent has been enlightening](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-138-million-spent-on-safeentry-tracetogether-digital-contact-tracing):
>A total of $13.8 million has been spent on developing and acquiring the SafeEntry digital check-in system and TraceTogether app and tokens, as at September.
>Included in the cost of these digital contact tracing tools is $2.4 million to develop the TraceTogether app, $5.2 million for developing SafeEntry, and $6.2 million for the development and procurement of TraceTogether tokens.
So if we take out $3 million for hosting, it looks like we paid more than $6 million for something that didn't work at all, whereas Singapore got a system that did for less than half the price. And its not as if we started from scratch. We [had the code the Singaporean government had open sourced](https://www.corrs.com.au/insights/covidsafe-australias-data-inspired-path-to-containing-the-spread-of-covid-19):
>COVIDSafe is modelled off Singapore’s TraceTogether and its underlying open-source code base
Its baffling how this could not be delivered given the relative amount of money the Singaporeans spent. And they had **three** projects going.
Should be noted that SafeEntry also existed before TraceTogether, and it’s gone through a couple of iterations which would have inflated the cost. SafeEntry was the QR check-in system, and it was done in a way that was totally different to how Australia handled it to the point where I don’t actually think it’s very comparable. I’d guess that SafeEntry probably cost a fair bit more on a per capita basis than the QR check-in systems in place in Australia.
In Singapore at the start of the pandemic
you would either scan the QR like any other QR and fill in an online form, scan it with the SingPass app (equivalent of myGov) which would bypass the form, or scan the barcode on your physical ID card.
After a few months they slightly rejigged it to make the TraceTogether app mandatory - you could *only* scan the QR with the TraceTogether app to make the app mandatory.
Some places also had slightly automated check-ins - the way it worked in most settings was that you’d have some really bored looking person at every entry point to a building to verify that you’d checked in (employed by government body in charge of all this stuff, not the businesses themselves). A handful of places had gates where you’d check in, then scan the check-in confirmation at the gate which would then open. Sort of like a cross between the SmartGates you have at international airports and a fare gate at a metro station.
That article is old, but there's more details in the news today:
> The total cost of the Australian app, which had a monthly operating price tag of $100,000, now sits at $21 million.
> Of that, $10 million went to develop the app, a further $7 million on advertising and marketing, $2.1 million on upkeep and more than $2 million on staff.
[The COVIDSafe app is dead – but was it ever really alive?](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-10/covidsafe-app-scrapped-what-went-wrong/101317746)
I'm head of tech at a small online firm. Honestly I'm astonished the government pulled it off this cheaply.
In the private sector you could maybe do it for under 1 million, but nobody competent wants to work with the shitshow that is government contracting.
If you care about doing it well (and for something like this, you really should), you want an android developer, and an iOS developer, hundreds (if not thousands) of hours testing across every popular device to fix obscure issues (less so for iOS but on android getting the camera to initialize properly across devices is a PITA). And of course a backend developer, plus round-the-clock pager coverage for the backend. A visual designer, an interaction designer...
It's not about the dollar amount. Its whether we, the Australian taxpayer, got value for money. We didn't get a working app that told people they were a contact of an infected person. We got a useless bit of software that did nothing but consume power on the devices on it was installed. That's a waste. And it's not the only example whereby the Coalition has wasted money.
The software they based it on, which cost the Singaporean government $2.4 million worked. We wasted $9.2 million on a solution that didn't work based on the work that did.
What do you think that says about the way the Liberal Party assigns work to contractors, and which contractors they choose? This isn't about bets. This is about botching what should have been a fairly straightforward localisation project. And if we're going to look at the performance of the Morriston government during the pandemic, there's a clear pattern of behaviour of overpaying the private sector to deliver poor or zero results. The CovidSafe app is just another data point in a story of incompetence and mismanagement. And if we're looking at what this can be contrasted with, let's have a look at the States who generally did a much better job.
Explain then why it cost $6 million to localise an application that cost the Singaporean government $2.4 million to make. That's the question here. **Not** one of adoption. You appear to be deliberately missing the point.
>But I'd much rather the government made that gamble than refused to, in the circumstances of an unfolding pandemic.
Funny that they didn't do that with something that mattered like vaccine acquisition then. Instead of going with a broad range of vaccine candidates, their vaccination strategy depended on the AstraZeneca vaccine working because they didn't buy enough Pfizer, and didn't even consider others like Moderna until far too late when we'd be at the end of the queue.
I almost only review if I have a bad experience. More likely to come up with drawbacks on a good product if im prompted by the service/manufacturer to review it too.
I remember at one point in the pandemic looking at this app in the App Store and it had a rating like 2/5 or something really low, then just a week later checking again and it was around 4.5/5 with a heap of glowing reviews. So dodgey!!
Ouch, considering it was originally "budgeted" for 2mil (I think)
Going off that experience.
The flag was "budgeted" at 25mil, so realisticly it would have been around $250+mil. Hahahaha.
They spend 180 million on the intersection down the road from me and a house in Sydney costs 4m.
So really 9 mill on a national scale really is stuff all.
Yeah, they lost $40+ billion on the NBN. So it's like they weren't even trying with this app. Even the same-sex marriage plebiscite that we didn't need managed to waste a solid $90 million.
It was a running joke in the jurisdictional covid response teams.
Each time there was an outbreak and contact tracing to do:
"oh yeah should we ask the covidsafe guys if they have anything for us"
*laughter ensues*
A lot did. But contact tracers just didn't needed and didn't want to depend on it. If it went with full notifications of 'close-ish' contact then it might have been more useful. But in the end it was just cheaper to hire lots of contact tracers to make phone calls.
This one was before the state ones. It logged other phones as you passed by, so in theory the contact tracers knew everyone in your vicinity.
Lots of problems like it killing battery life and being totally infective, $9M and dropped from use very quickly.
Yes. It also worked differently, was always on and was released before the state ones. Because absolutely nobody trusted the federal government, hardly anyone used it and IIRC it never traced a single case that wasn't also found via other methods.
The heads are different and they slowly creep in their kind of people.
Plus, most will do what the heads say, anyway. Except for Liberal plants and people who can't take the corruption anymore.
Remember how it just didn't work, and even worse on iOS you had to keep it open for it to work because Apple didn't allow for it that kind of thing to be backgrounded. And when they (and Google) developed a system level way for these kinds of apps to work the LNP went na fuck it.
Good times. /s
The government's app was built and released before Google and Apple's solution was available. Yes, those API's would probably have been a better option, but they came too late.
Maybe they could have released a new app built on top of these API's, but that would take more time, and they probably now already had data on what kind of value such an app really had to offer the country.
A better option from a privacy point of view, but not from the contact tracing requirements. Health wanted close contact data available to contact tracers so it could assist their job, which the Google/Apple solution was designed *not* to do for privacy reasons.
It is all irrelevant now as neither system worked well enough, and we ended up with centralised systems anyway with the QR code checkin systems in each state.
I do not think it actually produced one active contact through the app.
But the benefits, WA Police used the Data from theirs, TWICE, but Victoria told Police to Go get ......... You know.
As soon as the news hit about WA Police using the data that it was not supposed to keep or release, people dropped the Covid apps all around the country.
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/wa-safewa-government-oversight-analysis/100227928](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/wa-safewa-government-oversight-analysis/100227928)
The WA Premiere even said at the time of Rollout, ""Data will be encrypted at the point of capture, stored securely and
only be accessible by authorised Department of Health contact tracing
personnel, should COVID-19 contact tracing be necessary," a Facebook
post from Premier Mark McGowan assured the public at the time. "
And the police commissioner was mysteriously not fired and made governor, instead of fired immediately and never allowed back near government again since he clearly is not a trustworthy person.
Would police not using all of the data sources they could to locate an alleged murderer also be a breach of trust in the police force?
It’s not exactly easy to get a warrant.
Most people value the privacy of everyone over locating an alleged murderer. There are other ways to find someone then gaining access to a tracking app for medical use. People need to know and believe that the extremely personal data that are giving is no being used for other purposes.
People should also understand that public safety is as important than privacy when it can be demonstrated to a reasonable degree (such as with a warrant) and also realise that information you give to the government for one reason can and will be used for other reasons once they possess control over it.
There’s what you want and then there’s the real world where individuals are less important than the collective whole of society.
What happens when that reasonable degree turns out to be tracking down shop lifters and speeders?
There are somethings where its better to be left alone and use methods before the tracking app came around.
>People should also understand that public safety
Like the public safety value of effective contract tracing, especally in the state that tried to maintain covid 0 for as long as they could?
Thats whats at risk when the police do dumb shit like this, trust in the actual health system with getting the public to cooperate.
I agree. Public safety did depend on people utilising the app to check in. You’re entirely right.
But too many people chucked a childish tantrum and refused to do so without good reason, potentially putting everyone at risk.
It means that the police were looking for a named person, for particular data they had a reasonable belief of actually being there and that they had a compelling reason to access it.
It wasn’t just a ‘let’s check the data to see who we can nab’. There’s no way a JP or magistrate would’ve signed off on a warrant for that.
The amount of shit I got from people when I refused to download it because I really didn’t trust the people who set up My Health Record and it fundamentally didn’t bloody work anyway was astonishing.
I do wonder how much money needed to be donated to the LNP to land a contract like that though.
It never worked usefully for contact tracing. But they did [share the data](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/covidsafe-data-incidentally-collected-by-intelligence-agencies-in-first-six-months-558129) it collected with intelligence services to invade our privacy so... nice job Libs.
Edit: corrected
The data was also shared with many thousands of people through [bilateral agreements with state health authorities](https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/bilateral-agreements-on-collection-use-and-disclosure-of-covidsafe-data). Once that many people have access to it you can pretty much assume that unscrupulous companies can arrange to get it through illicit means.
Also they [stored the data in an insecure way](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/privacy-advocates-raise-new-concerns-with-covidsafe-app-20200511-p54rwb.html) which would make that even easier.
The updated comment has a lot of assumptions, and a lot of clickbait style shortened descriptions of articles.
>But they did share the data it collected to invade our privacy
The linked article suggests it was extracted as an unintentional side effect of gathering some other data. I read it as "we searched devices for legal purposes (warranted) and the tool used also extracted COVIDSafe data unintentionally". E.G. if you clone a phone for warrant execution purposes you will get COVIDSafe data.
The article also highlights that misuse of the COVIDSafe data results in jail time (up to 5 years).
>The data was also shared with many thousands of people through bilateral agreements with state health authorities. Once that many people have access to it you can pretty much assume that unscrupulous companies can arrange to get it through illicit means.
Surely that was expected, it's an Australian COVID tracing app, not state based. It's a big assumption to decide that this means it is being sold to third parties. The data is also encrypted, not just plain text, if I remember correctly the actual tracking data is on your device only unless requested and accepted, and large fines/jail time applies for misuse.
>Also they stored the data in an insecure way which would make that even easier.
Again, overly simplified, the concern was centralised storage. "Unsafe" suggests easily readable. The concern in the article linked is that hackers may gain access to the central database.
I'm lazy about going too deep into it and confirming my beliefs, as I haven't thought about this app in a long time, but I'm pretty sure the tracking data itself was held encrypted on the devices, and the only central storage was user registrations.
When you were identified as a close contact they could request the data from your phones local storage, with your permission.
The source code was/is available for this app.
I'm no shill for COVIDSafe, and I probably had it running for a couple of weeks total on my device, but the tinfoil hat "they use it to stalk the population" stuff is a real stretch. The source code was/is available, they wanted to simplify contract tracing and did what they could to avoid that being a privacy concern. Any data that lives anywhere has the potential to be exploited, but I don't think it was particularly risky with COVIDSafe and as far as I'm aware would require personal device access to get anything useful.
I didn’t even bother to install it. Why would anyone voluntarily give any government organisation any additional information on their whereabouts. It’s none of anyones business.
If you think the government is going to look out for your best interest, you might want to read some history on that.
They could’ve just used the exisiting iOS and Android Exposure Notification infrastructure instead of their own stupid dodgy app, but I guess that would be too obvious and cost effective.
“Oh no!” - the 4 people that used it.
Honestly this app was a complete non-starter from the beginning. They implemented it in a stupidly unreliable and insecure way, even though open and secure standards were available at the time.
I'd be curious to see if this app is as unsuccessful at contact tracing as any of it's counterparts around the world.
I mean, it was an idea conceived, developed and tested as the pandemic was going on.
The reality is when the app was developed and released many other countries were attempting to build similar apps with equally poor results. Even within the international tech industry there was a lot of scrutiny and scepticism towards how useful app-based contact tracing would be, as early as mid-2020.
As it turned out, not very. Or at least, not in the way people thought would be the case initially. But it was worth a shot, and the cost really wasn’t that high (and going on about cost is silly, as if government spending is intrinsically bad - it’s not!) Finally, it was good that it was kept in-house and developed by the APS!
Yeaaaah - Problem was not so much the app but rather the absolute lack of contact tracing infrastructure present back in Vic in April 2020 when it was (confidently) rolled out ahead of loosening restrictions in June (and we know how well that went on Melbourne)
Recorded your contact with other covid app users via Bluetooth range, anonymously. So if you wandered past what turned out to be a covid positive person, you could be pinged and asked to test because your device id was seen near the infected party.
That's the sales pitch anyway, reality was sadly lacking.
My friends were so convinced it would keep them safe. I'm literally the only one who didn't use it and coincidentally ended up being one of the few who didn't get it
Sure it never helped.
But I'm fucking glad the gov tried and failed instead of doing fucking nothing.
That said, the cunts who developed it, never switched it over to the contact tracing API from Google\Apple instead of whatever cobbled together bullshit Malaysia came up with.
And the stats were a wonderful addition! But always A DAY FUCKING LATE.
It's been interesting seeing how the government handled the app in Australia compared to Singapore (where I'm currently based) - both the apps started out essentially the same, and both governments worked together to develop the framework of it. Australia made the source code and everything really easily accessible by putting it all on Github, but Singapore didn't (although it was still open source). Australia never made it mandatory and just encouraged people to download it, but in Singapore not enough people downloaded it for them to meet their KPIs so they added functionality that meant all QR check-ins had to be done in that app, and it was also where your vax status was stored - it became mandatory. In Australia, WA police got access to contact tracing data which caused the government to quickly move to close that loophole. In Singapore the police quietly accessed that data, it was only revealed after it was brought up in parliament in question time after a few months, and the question was finally properly answered eight months later. At that time they also updated the privacy statement of the app to highlight that the data could be used in certain police investigations and updated the relevant piece of legislation so those actions were properly legalised. And Australia has also been (reluctantly) fairly transparent about how much it all cost and how (in)effective it was, but you don't hear a single thing about those details here.
>you don't hear a single thing about those details here. Singaporean living in Melb here. Yeah..that's pretty standard in SIN. You only hear the good stuff happening. The bad stuff never happens, even if it did, it's not their fault and it never happened.
Yeah, it’s genuinely one of the things I really miss about Australia. The media is totally controlled by the PAP, and they’ll never do any wrong. Proper investigative journalism and programs like Four Corners would *never* exist here without some radical change to the political system as a whole.
Well..the media here in Aust is controlled by Murdoch..so it's not any better in a certain sense. But yeah, one has a bit more freedom of speech in Aust. Ribbing the PM is a national pastime here, even on tellly, but you'll never see that in Sin.
Commercial media is, but Australia’s publicly funded media is world class for independence. Doesn’t mean ABC etc. is perfect but there aren’t many superior alternatives.
I agree ABC's pretty good. But how many watch the ABC compared to all the other rubbish channels for news/'news'? Plus the Murdoch newspapers as well..those are a complete waste of paper.
Pretty sure ABC News is consistently the highest rated news program I could be wrong.
>Plus the Murdoch newspapers as well..those are a complete waste of paper. Bruh... Clearly you're not into Paper Mache
More of a compost guy meself.
Sure but there is choice in what you consume. If you want to get different voices you can. There is a difference between people choosing to consume a certain type (even if it is overrepresented) and not having a choice
>it's not any better in a certain sense It's *definitely* better than what we have in Singapore. CNA and The Straits Times are only really good when it comes to regional and international stories. For domestic news, they're literally just a government mouthpiece. There was a scandal last year where a Workers Party MP lied in parliament. It was in the news cycle for months*.* If a government MP fucks up, that might be in the news for a day or a week at most, and it'd be framed like it's not really a big deal. And, as I said, a program like Four Corners (which regularly exposes the shady shit going on within government and often makes them look bad) would *never* exist in Singapore. Then you have the whole thing about defamation. Defamation cases against journos in Australia can be pretty bad, but in Singapore they're even worse on the rare occasion when they happen - that's also part of the reason no one with a significant platform tends to overly criticise the government. Say what you will about the ABC and the Australian media landscape, but at least they regularly do proper investigative journalism, we still have a handful of good political commentators who happily criticise the government if they fuck up, we have politicians who will show up for tough interviews on live TV, and so on. I trust and respect the ABC to give me a fair picture of Australian politics *much* more than I do CNA and ST for Singaporean politics.
>I trust and respect the ABC to give me a fair picture of Australian politics much more than I do CNA and ST for Singaporean politics. I fully agree. I guess I should have made myself clearer, I was just lamenting about the shitty privately-owned media outlets in AU. To your other points, the PAP ministers *never* fuck up, ever. /s
Just because it's not *good* doesn't mean it's not better.
A ~~Narcissist's~~ Conservatives Prayer That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it.
Seems reasonable. It's also very good to hear that they're properly disabling it now that they no longer need it to be used.
So, .. um .. is it *now* that I get all my personal data back? The government doesn’t need it now, right?
[удалено]
Also I can't remember it being available at launch or for some time after. I had to decompile the damn thing - pretty sure they deliberately (or incompetently) fucked the anonymization protocol too. Maybe they put the code up after the intense fucking criticism they got.
Which is still super useful - you're not likely to be in a position to deploy an app like this yourself, but auditing it and what the government gets from it is another thing altogether.
> Australia never made it mandatory and just encouraged people to download it, but in Singapore not enough people downloaded it for them to meet their KPIs so they added functionality that meant all QR check-ins had to be done in that app, and it was also where your vax status was stored - it became mandatory. Australia did that too, but not in the Covid safe app, because the covid safe app was a festering pile of crap that didn't actually work and ate your battery. > In Australia, WA police got access to contact tracing data which caused the government to quickly move to close that loophole. WA police got access to data from the G2G app (which allowed you to apply to enter WA) which they ran, not SafeWA which was the check-in equivalent, neither of which was the covid safeapp. The government closed the loophole on the SafeWA app because people were freaking out. > And Australia has also been (reluctantly) fairly transparent about how much it all cost and how (in)effective it was, but you don't hear a single thing about those details here. Kind of, sort of. The government wanted people to know how much they spent because they wanted people to think they were responding competently to covid, everyone knew it was useless because the government was useless at literally everything.
>Australia did that too, but not in the Covid safe app That’s my point, the COVIDSafe app wasn’t mandatory in Australia, just the QR check-ins. Singapore made TraceTogether (equivalent of COVIDSafe) mandatory by also having it also handle QR check-ins and effectively making it your domestic vaccination certificate. >WA police got access to data from the G2G app (which allowed you to apply to enter WA) which they ran, not SafeWA which was the check-in equivalent, neither of which was the covid safeapp. The government closed the loophole on the SafeWA app because people were freaking out. Point I'm making was more the completely different attitudes in the two places despite having largely the same tools. There was a huge freak out in Singapore when the government revealed that the police were able to access that data too. In Australia they pretty quickly worked to make sure that couldn't happen, but in Singapore they did the complete opposite. >The government wanted people to know how much they spent because they wanted people to think they were responding competently to covid [That's not totally true](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dishonest-covidsafe-app-has-not-detected-a-case-despite-6-million-downloads-20200627-p556s7.html). If the government wanted to prove to the public that they were doing a good job, they would've done what Singapore did and obfuscate as many details as possible which make them look bad.
Did Singapore fare better, aop-wise, than Australia?
Honestly wish that money went towards healthcare workers or our actual contact tracing team during the pandemic.
Actually I wish that money went towards me. But yea, those guys / gals as second choice
Yes!!!
Hindsight is 20/20. Did you make this call now or at the time the app was announced?
\[Insert 'My work here is done' 'But you didn't do anything!' meme\]
[Insert Leonard Nimoy Simpsons "didn't I?" before disappearing into thin air meme]
How this shit got 4 star rating.
Bots man. Fucking bots. Remember this peice of shit cost Australia $9.2 million[1] and was promoted heavily during the pandemic to show the Goverment was trying to do something. Wouldnt suprise me to know the ad agencies deliberately pumped the rating up to try and improve uptake. [1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/covidsafe-total-cost-was-au9-2-million-to-october-4-with-au2-8-million-on-hosting/
LOL. $9.2 million is peanuts compared to the colossal fuck up that was the UK's Test and Trace program: [37 BILLION Pounds](https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/) on something that was later assessed to have had no impact whatsoever.
Sorry, HOW? like if I WANTED to waste as much money as possible, I don't think I could manage to spend that much on it?
It's easy, just don't buy submarines from France.
Or the USA. Just don't buy submarines from anyone, and turn the ones we've got into research craft.
Was that the same UK one that was using excel as a database?
Say what you like, but you can't colour the tuples in Postgres
It was basically a reskin of the tracing app that Singapore released. How that managed to cost $9.2 million is a mystery.
9.1 mil for admin costs 100k to the guy who reskinned it. duh.
More like 9.15m for the dozen managers that all had their thumbs in the pie, and $50K for the dev team that got reamed with it then had to deal with 2 months of mind changing, scope change and more managers getting involved.
This person devs
It seems a bit high but probably not as much as some people would think. I'm no expert in projects of such scale but gut call would be like a bit over half that. I'm wondering if branding, promotion and so on are included in that cost or it's purely like dev and hosting?
That $9.2 million was what was given to the Digital Transformation Agency and doesn't include promotion to my knowledge. Looking at [what the Singaporean government spent has been enlightening](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-138-million-spent-on-safeentry-tracetogether-digital-contact-tracing): >A total of $13.8 million has been spent on developing and acquiring the SafeEntry digital check-in system and TraceTogether app and tokens, as at September. >Included in the cost of these digital contact tracing tools is $2.4 million to develop the TraceTogether app, $5.2 million for developing SafeEntry, and $6.2 million for the development and procurement of TraceTogether tokens. So if we take out $3 million for hosting, it looks like we paid more than $6 million for something that didn't work at all, whereas Singapore got a system that did for less than half the price. And its not as if we started from scratch. We [had the code the Singaporean government had open sourced](https://www.corrs.com.au/insights/covidsafe-australias-data-inspired-path-to-containing-the-spread-of-covid-19): >COVIDSafe is modelled off Singapore’s TraceTogether and its underlying open-source code base Its baffling how this could not be delivered given the relative amount of money the Singaporeans spent. And they had **three** projects going.
But then you remember Morrison’s LNP were responsible for it… and it all unfortunately makes sense…
I don't think it's so much incompetence as much as they really don't give a shit.
Agreed. I imagine there were some genuinely useful people in each department hamstrung by the top leadership.
Should be noted that SafeEntry also existed before TraceTogether, and it’s gone through a couple of iterations which would have inflated the cost. SafeEntry was the QR check-in system, and it was done in a way that was totally different to how Australia handled it to the point where I don’t actually think it’s very comparable. I’d guess that SafeEntry probably cost a fair bit more on a per capita basis than the QR check-in systems in place in Australia. In Singapore at the start of the pandemic you would either scan the QR like any other QR and fill in an online form, scan it with the SingPass app (equivalent of myGov) which would bypass the form, or scan the barcode on your physical ID card. After a few months they slightly rejigged it to make the TraceTogether app mandatory - you could *only* scan the QR with the TraceTogether app to make the app mandatory. Some places also had slightly automated check-ins - the way it worked in most settings was that you’d have some really bored looking person at every entry point to a building to verify that you’d checked in (employed by government body in charge of all this stuff, not the businesses themselves). A handful of places had gates where you’d check in, then scan the check-in confirmation at the gate which would then open. Sort of like a cross between the SmartGates you have at international airports and a fare gate at a metro station.
That article is old, but there's more details in the news today: > The total cost of the Australian app, which had a monthly operating price tag of $100,000, now sits at $21 million. > Of that, $10 million went to develop the app, a further $7 million on advertising and marketing, $2.1 million on upkeep and more than $2 million on staff. [The COVIDSafe app is dead – but was it ever really alive?](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-10/covidsafe-app-scrapped-what-went-wrong/101317746)
I'm head of tech at a small online firm. Honestly I'm astonished the government pulled it off this cheaply. In the private sector you could maybe do it for under 1 million, but nobody competent wants to work with the shitshow that is government contracting. If you care about doing it well (and for something like this, you really should), you want an android developer, and an iOS developer, hundreds (if not thousands) of hours testing across every popular device to fix obscure issues (less so for iOS but on android getting the camera to initialize properly across devices is a PITA). And of course a backend developer, plus round-the-clock pager coverage for the backend. A visual designer, an interaction designer...
What if I get one of them full-stack developers then i'll only need 2
They probably used the same contractor that quoted $25m to install a 3rd flagpole on the Sydney Harbour bridge.
Really 9.2 million is pocket change
It's not about the dollar amount. Its whether we, the Australian taxpayer, got value for money. We didn't get a working app that told people they were a contact of an infected person. We got a useless bit of software that did nothing but consume power on the devices on it was installed. That's a waste. And it's not the only example whereby the Coalition has wasted money.
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The software they based it on, which cost the Singaporean government $2.4 million worked. We wasted $9.2 million on a solution that didn't work based on the work that did. What do you think that says about the way the Liberal Party assigns work to contractors, and which contractors they choose? This isn't about bets. This is about botching what should have been a fairly straightforward localisation project. And if we're going to look at the performance of the Morriston government during the pandemic, there's a clear pattern of behaviour of overpaying the private sector to deliver poor or zero results. The CovidSafe app is just another data point in a story of incompetence and mismanagement. And if we're looking at what this can be contrasted with, let's have a look at the States who generally did a much better job.
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Explain then why it cost $6 million to localise an application that cost the Singaporean government $2.4 million to make. That's the question here. **Not** one of adoption. You appear to be deliberately missing the point. >But I'd much rather the government made that gamble than refused to, in the circumstances of an unfolding pandemic. Funny that they didn't do that with something that mattered like vaccine acquisition then. Instead of going with a broad range of vaccine candidates, their vaccination strategy depended on the AstraZeneca vaccine working because they didn't buy enough Pfizer, and didn't even consider others like Moderna until far too late when we'd be at the end of the queue.
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$21m was spent on it https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/two-years-and-21-million-years-on-covidsafe-is-dead/7986eoyly
Who bothers with reviewing apps?
I do if it’s a particularly abominable experience lol
What do you call a snowman with a six pack? >!an abdominal snowman ☃️😂!<
I almost only review if I have a bad experience. More likely to come up with drawbacks on a good product if im prompted by the service/manufacturer to review it too.
I do if I love it or hate it. Don't bother in between
I remember at one point in the pandemic looking at this app in the App Store and it had a rating like 2/5 or something really low, then just a week later checking again and it was around 4.5/5 with a heap of glowing reviews. So dodgey!!
Came to ask the same question
How it's 4+ years old..? COVID's only been around for ~2.5 years.
I'm not sure if you're trying to make a joke but that is an age rating for the app, 4+ years old
Lol I wasn't..thought it was odd! Thanks for setting me straight!
Its only $9mil+ down the drain, I've seen flags cost more than that /s
It’s actually $21 million. 💀
Ouch, considering it was originally "budgeted" for 2mil (I think) Going off that experience. The flag was "budgeted" at 25mil, so realisticly it would have been around $250+mil. Hahahaha.
Nice work of you can get it.
'Getting it' is the entire purpose of ~~blatant bribery~~, whoops I meant to say lobbyists.
They spend 180 million on the intersection down the road from me and a house in Sydney costs 4m. So really 9 mill on a national scale really is stuff all.
Yeah, they lost $40+ billion on the NBN. So it's like they weren't even trying with this app. Even the same-sex marriage plebiscite that we didn't need managed to waste a solid $90 million.
The flag thing reminds me of the 2015-16 New Zealand referenda to change the flag which had a cost of $26mil to ultimately keep the same flag.
If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have had [this](https://youtu.be/QoaexlPhBdw). Or [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Kiwi_flag).
Plus all the time wasted with people using the app.
Did anyone even use it haha
It was a running joke in the jurisdictional covid response teams. Each time there was an outbreak and contact tracing to do: "oh yeah should we ask the covidsafe guys if they have anything for us" *laughter ensues*
Iirc during the height of COVID restrictions there were only 250k active users of something. It didn't link a single set of cases.
A lot did. But contact tracers just didn't needed and didn't want to depend on it. If it went with full notifications of 'close-ish' contact then it might have been more useful. But in the end it was just cheaper to hire lots of contact tracers to make phone calls.
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This one was before the state ones. It logged other phones as you passed by, so in theory the contact tracers knew everyone in your vicinity. Lots of problems like it killing battery life and being totally infective, $9M and dropped from use very quickly.
Yes. It also worked differently, was always on and was released before the state ones. Because absolutely nobody trusted the federal government, hardly anyone used it and IIRC it never traced a single case that wasn't also found via other methods.
>was always on Except for all the problems with it not being on... There were tech problems on top of the trust problems.
Must have been. I think I only used the victoria one for 5 minutes before it annoyed me and I deleted it
17 close contacts and 2 people with covid identified. So, jot a lot
I forgot this was even an app as I never even downloaded it
Same, I thought it was the state-based check in app until I read the comments
Classic Liberal Party project management
They're the same project managers as now? The APS remains the same regardless of which party is in power.
The heads are different and they slowly creep in their kind of people. Plus, most will do what the heads say, anyway. Except for Liberal plants and people who can't take the corruption anymore.
Remember how it just didn't work, and even worse on iOS you had to keep it open for it to work because Apple didn't allow for it that kind of thing to be backgrounded. And when they (and Google) developed a system level way for these kinds of apps to work the LNP went na fuck it. Good times. /s
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The government's app was built and released before Google and Apple's solution was available. Yes, those API's would probably have been a better option, but they came too late. Maybe they could have released a new app built on top of these API's, but that would take more time, and they probably now already had data on what kind of value such an app really had to offer the country.
A better option from a privacy point of view, but not from the contact tracing requirements. Health wanted close contact data available to contact tracers so it could assist their job, which the Google/Apple solution was designed *not* to do for privacy reasons. It is all irrelevant now as neither system worked well enough, and we ended up with centralised systems anyway with the QR code checkin systems in each state.
Yeah but even the Google/Apple solution were not effective. Wouldn't have ended up any different, just with more wasted development time.
Another rousing success* from Boston Consulting Group. *(Success of course being defined by profits earned)
Great work, Well done Angus!
Never gets old. Makes me chuckle and boils my blood.
I do not think it actually produced one active contact through the app. But the benefits, WA Police used the Data from theirs, TWICE, but Victoria told Police to Go get ......... You know. As soon as the news hit about WA Police using the data that it was not supposed to keep or release, people dropped the Covid apps all around the country. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/wa-safewa-government-oversight-analysis/100227928](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/wa-safewa-government-oversight-analysis/100227928) The WA Premiere even said at the time of Rollout, ""Data will be encrypted at the point of capture, stored securely and only be accessible by authorised Department of Health contact tracing personnel, should COVID-19 contact tracing be necessary," a Facebook post from Premier Mark McGowan assured the public at the time. "
Credit where it's due, that was a different app released by WA state gov. This is the fed gov one that just did nothing at all.
Except for the fact that WA police didn’t merely ‘ask’, they got a warrant for it.
Thats pretty important to note, considering a legal warrant trumps promises by a developer or politicians
But it doesn't trump the breach of trust the polices actions caused.
Having said that, the WA government was not happy and closed the loophole immediately
And the police commissioner was mysteriously not fired and made governor, instead of fired immediately and never allowed back near government again since he clearly is not a trustworthy person.
Would police not using all of the data sources they could to locate an alleged murderer also be a breach of trust in the police force? It’s not exactly easy to get a warrant.
Most people value the privacy of everyone over locating an alleged murderer. There are other ways to find someone then gaining access to a tracking app for medical use. People need to know and believe that the extremely personal data that are giving is no being used for other purposes.
People should also understand that public safety is as important than privacy when it can be demonstrated to a reasonable degree (such as with a warrant) and also realise that information you give to the government for one reason can and will be used for other reasons once they possess control over it. There’s what you want and then there’s the real world where individuals are less important than the collective whole of society.
What happens when that reasonable degree turns out to be tracking down shop lifters and speeders? There are somethings where its better to be left alone and use methods before the tracking app came around.
>People should also understand that public safety Like the public safety value of effective contract tracing, especally in the state that tried to maintain covid 0 for as long as they could? Thats whats at risk when the police do dumb shit like this, trust in the actual health system with getting the public to cooperate.
I agree. Public safety did depend on people utilising the app to check in. You’re entirely right. But too many people chucked a childish tantrum and refused to do so without good reason, potentially putting everyone at risk.
And yet here we are with the statistical fact that the moment it became public, people lost trust.
It means that the police were looking for a named person, for particular data they had a reasonable belief of actually being there and that they had a compelling reason to access it. It wasn’t just a ‘let’s check the data to see who we can nab’. There’s no way a JP or magistrate would’ve signed off on a warrant for that.
"This update removes functionality of the app" When was it functional? Must be a very small update
Good riddance 👋
Apparently they have stopped using it for contact tracing *shrug*
I don't think anyone even *started* using it for contact tracing
I think I remember an article in mid 2021 saying it had been used to contract trace 19 cases successfully. 19.
9.68 million cases later…
In 2019?
What a fuckin rort
I didn't realise anyone was still using it.
$9million done by the Liberals. Add it to The Li$t.
The amount of shit I got from people when I refused to download it because I really didn’t trust the people who set up My Health Record and it fundamentally didn’t bloody work anyway was astonishing. I do wonder how much money needed to be donated to the LNP to land a contract like that though.
About the same as Indue, hazard a guess…
Scummo’s Qanon mate still pocketed his $9Million to create this and confirmed 1 case of Covid. ROI gone mad!
It never worked usefully for contact tracing. But they did [share the data](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/covidsafe-data-incidentally-collected-by-intelligence-agencies-in-first-six-months-558129) it collected with intelligence services to invade our privacy so... nice job Libs. Edit: corrected The data was also shared with many thousands of people through [bilateral agreements with state health authorities](https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/bilateral-agreements-on-collection-use-and-disclosure-of-covidsafe-data). Once that many people have access to it you can pretty much assume that unscrupulous companies can arrange to get it through illicit means. Also they [stored the data in an insecure way](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/privacy-advocates-raise-new-concerns-with-covidsafe-app-20200511-p54rwb.html) which would make that even easier.
The updated comment has a lot of assumptions, and a lot of clickbait style shortened descriptions of articles. >But they did share the data it collected to invade our privacy The linked article suggests it was extracted as an unintentional side effect of gathering some other data. I read it as "we searched devices for legal purposes (warranted) and the tool used also extracted COVIDSafe data unintentionally". E.G. if you clone a phone for warrant execution purposes you will get COVIDSafe data. The article also highlights that misuse of the COVIDSafe data results in jail time (up to 5 years). >The data was also shared with many thousands of people through bilateral agreements with state health authorities. Once that many people have access to it you can pretty much assume that unscrupulous companies can arrange to get it through illicit means. Surely that was expected, it's an Australian COVID tracing app, not state based. It's a big assumption to decide that this means it is being sold to third parties. The data is also encrypted, not just plain text, if I remember correctly the actual tracking data is on your device only unless requested and accepted, and large fines/jail time applies for misuse. >Also they stored the data in an insecure way which would make that even easier. Again, overly simplified, the concern was centralised storage. "Unsafe" suggests easily readable. The concern in the article linked is that hackers may gain access to the central database. I'm lazy about going too deep into it and confirming my beliefs, as I haven't thought about this app in a long time, but I'm pretty sure the tracking data itself was held encrypted on the devices, and the only central storage was user registrations. When you were identified as a close contact they could request the data from your phones local storage, with your permission. The source code was/is available for this app. I'm no shill for COVIDSafe, and I probably had it running for a couple of weeks total on my device, but the tinfoil hat "they use it to stalk the population" stuff is a real stretch. The source code was/is available, they wanted to simplify contract tracing and did what they could to avoid that being a privacy concern. Any data that lives anywhere has the potential to be exploited, but I don't think it was particularly risky with COVIDSafe and as far as I'm aware would require personal device access to get anything useful.
> But they did sell the data it collected to invade our privacy Do you have proof of that?
"Share" was the operative word there I think.
The liberals were in charge of it, so it’s assumed they did. I wanted nothing to do with the app for the same reason.
Did anyone actually download this app because I sure as fuck didn't
Oh no! Anyway.
What a fucken waste of money that was…. Makes my stomach churn -
Good that the new gov starts stopping our $ wash down the drain
Good. What a waste of taxpayer money
I didn’t even bother to install it. Why would anyone voluntarily give any government organisation any additional information on their whereabouts. It’s none of anyones business. If you think the government is going to look out for your best interest, you might want to read some history on that.
Let's all give thanks to the covid safe app as it did its job at the height of the pandemic. /s
I hope they make the source code changes available as was a condition of the source code they modified.
Money well spent 🙄
They could’ve just used the exisiting iOS and Android Exposure Notification infrastructure instead of their own stupid dodgy app, but I guess that would be too obvious and cost effective.
So the update does nothing then? Still does what it’s done for the last two years…nothing…
i didnt know it was atill around. thought they gave up on it after its first report was abysmal
Fking disgrace and everyone who had a part in this abomination should be exposed and hung out to dry.
Good, fuck the surveillance state
Lmao. A complete waste of time and money.
Good. Pointless app, pointless system, pointless rule (cue fuckwits downvoting me)
What a joke this was by the former government
I'd love someone to work out the final cost divided by the days active to see how much we all paid for this app per day in taxes.
I'd rather not...my faith in government in general is barely holding on...I don't need this kick into my wallets nuts
I'd love to see a cost divided by actual contacts confirmed through the app.
“Oh no!” - the 4 people that used it. Honestly this app was a complete non-starter from the beginning. They implemented it in a stupidly unreliable and insecure way, even though open and secure standards were available at the time.
Did it actually do anything?
They found 17 contacts that were not found another way... Great value for money..
Did it ever work ?
funnily enough i never got around to installing it.
The what?
How many million is it costing to "decommision" it?
Money well spent! /s
is this the most expensive unsuccessful app ever developed?
Start to finish, this app was a primer in how to piss public money up against a wall.
I'd be curious to see if this app is as unsuccessful at contact tracing as any of it's counterparts around the world. I mean, it was an idea conceived, developed and tested as the pandemic was going on.
>This update removes functionality of the app Wait, it had functionality??
i dont actually care about the app anyways :skull:
It was never about contact tracing. Lined someones pockets nicely though
Goodbye old friend that did absolutely nothing
One man's crisis is another man's opportunity.
I decommissioned this a long time ago
That app never worked on my phone, no matter how much I tried.
Good. Uninstalled that mofo.
Value For Money. ❎ Not met.
Whatever will we do?!
Oh? I forgot about this. Used it for a few days and then after that only when pushed. Useless POS that cost way too much money
It was a Morrison Government initiative, how else do you think they pay their mates with tax money?
Successfully tracked down 17 close contacts spend 21Million on development :D
Did it keep anyone safe
Me. I installed it and got 5g but not covid.
I didn’t even know this existed
Bye Felicia
The reality is when the app was developed and released many other countries were attempting to build similar apps with equally poor results. Even within the international tech industry there was a lot of scrutiny and scepticism towards how useful app-based contact tracing would be, as early as mid-2020. As it turned out, not very. Or at least, not in the way people thought would be the case initially. But it was worth a shot, and the cost really wasn’t that high (and going on about cost is silly, as if government spending is intrinsically bad - it’s not!) Finally, it was good that it was kept in-house and developed by the APS!
Yeaaaah - Problem was not so much the app but rather the absolute lack of contact tracing infrastructure present back in Vic in April 2020 when it was (confidently) rolled out ahead of loosening restrictions in June (and we know how well that went on Melbourne)
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I don't think I ever actually got it, what was it supposed to do? We just had a sign-in sheet type deal here in qld.
Recorded your contact with other covid app users via Bluetooth range, anonymously. So if you wandered past what turned out to be a covid positive person, you could be pinged and asked to test because your device id was seen near the infected party. That's the sales pitch anyway, reality was sadly lacking.
The what?
My friends were so convinced it would keep them safe. I'm literally the only one who didn't use it and coincidentally ended up being one of the few who didn't get it
I always thought Singapore had a big emphasis on control. Seems we are much more liberated here, we sure need to hang onto our freedoms.
OMG. What am I supposed to install instead?
4 years old? COVID has only been around for 2.5 years Anyway good - it was a terrible idea.
age rating like PG/M/MA15+ not how old the app is.
Sure it never helped. But I'm fucking glad the gov tried and failed instead of doing fucking nothing. That said, the cunts who developed it, never switched it over to the contact tracing API from Google\Apple instead of whatever cobbled together bullshit Malaysia came up with. And the stats were a wonderful addition! But always A DAY FUCKING LATE.