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The federal government has scrapped its much-maligned COVIDSafe contact tracing app, with Health Minister Mark Butler deeming it “no longer necessary” to control the spread of the virus.
The Department of Health said COVIDSafe was “being retired” in an update on the Apple and Google app stores on Tuesday afternoon, and asked users to start uninstalling the app.
“This app is no longer used in contact tracing,” read the release notes for the latest update to the COVIDSafe App List.
“This update removes functionality from the app so that no information is stored or collected. This will enable the downgrade process [sic] from COVIDSafe.
When attempting to open the app, users receive a notice stating: “Data is no longer being collected and will be deleted from the national COVIDSafe data store”.
“The data on your devices will be deleted when you uninstall the app,” the notice reads, with users directed to a website to help them remove the app.
Screenshot of the COVIDSafe app
The government’s decision to drop COVIDSafe months after Australia embarked on a “normalization programme” appears to have come into force on Sunday, following a seven-day grace period.
The Privacy (Public Health Contact Information) (End of COVIDSafe data period) Determination 2022 was made on July 31, but was only published on Tuesday.
“The Minister of Health is satisfied that, following the end of the seven-day period from the day of registration of this device, the use of COVIDSafe is no longer necessary for prevention or control; the entry, emergence, establishment or spread of [Covid-19] in Australia,” it read.
Ahead of the May election, a Labor-led Senate committee called on the then government to stop funding COVIDSafe, citing the app’s “high cost and significant limitations”.
As of October 2021, COVIDSafe had cost the government over $9 million, including $2.77 million in Amazon Web Services hosting fees.
The report says COVIDSafe was not used by state governments during the Delta outbreak in 2021 and only 17 unique contacts were identified using the app in 2020.
Last year, the Department of Health also acknowledged that the app was “rarely” used, but at the time this was due to low rates of community transmission and manual contact tracing.
But with the average death toll rising from around 20 a day to more than 70 in the months since the government ended its pandemic emergency powers, the government has finally come to the party. .
COVIDSafe was launched to much fanfare in April 2020, with former Prime Minister Scott Morrison describing it as “like wearing sunscreen outside”, but it quickly became a source of derision for the government.
Early on, it became clear that logging encounters on iOS devices, especially when COVIDSafe was running in the background, was problematic, a problem that persisted even after updating the app with a new Bluetooth protocol. .
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