Australia’s expensive CovidSafe app finally gets decommissioned

I very much hope we get a lot of hindsight view, and would like to stress the app, and it's 15min gating for exposure risk were roundly criticised at the time. So the hindsight, is just a formalism against the things we said in advance of its release, and in use day to day.

Most Australians I speak to agree that this app was a "be seen to be doing something" waste of public money, and the entirely rational offers from Apple and Google were denied for specious reasons grounded in "not invented here" and historical fears of privacy. This was not helped when at least one state police force attempted to use the data to prove somebody's presence in a crime scene, mixing the pot quite badly. The "Australia card" and online health record debates have made it plain we have zero tolerance in Australia for data cross matching.

The app was useless. We all new it. Even the developers must have known it. It was health pantomime comparable to the woo-woo bomb detectors which were plastic sticks wiggled under cars in the middle east (not to be confused with mirrors on sticks which at least did what they said)

There was no 15min safe window for exposure. It was stupid. The model was inverted from one where you were told sites of infectious risk and a time, to self asses your exposure, which would have been pretty easily adopted and required no central authority.

In my state app (qld) the "logout of being at a site" function did not actually work: you could not actually use the app to bound your exposure window in time. It was ridiculously hard to use one phone for multiple people and once it became a proof of vaccinations status tool, wouldn't work for groups at all.

While the app was rubbish, it did stir up some interesting questions.

I do wonder about where the biggest critics of it are now? There was the whole issue of slowly taking peoples rights with the assumption that they would never come back - and yet all of them where returned in good time - even if a little early on some.

Not saying Oz is a paradise of freedom, far from it, but in this case it was at least temporary.