Not the case even when it appears so. For example the US makes a long arm of their laws law. They have the means to coerce other countries to abide by, or pass complimentary local laws, for those ends.
Most obvious case in point is FATCA whereby the world financial community was obligated to salute or have businesses banned or prosecuted in the US. One can argue they are all separate laws now, but not how it began.
I have an old phone with Android 6.0.1 (just squeaked it in!) and Covid Safe uses 12% battery, 42% is Mobile Standby. I have to charge it twice a day; that hasn’t changed. We don’t have a mobile signal and I don’t have location services activated, and I don’t use any browsing data.
For me, staying at home except for the (socially distanced) fortnightly food shop and once a week milk/bread top up, it isn’t going to record anything. I keep a diary, so I know who visited the farm and where I went, but there are a lot of people who come into contact with people they don’t know or who can’t remember who / where they have been. For the sake of lifting restrictions I downloaded it.
I provided the link in the previous post…and here is is again…click on this text to go to the legislation. It was enacted on the 25 April 2020, in the days before apps release (Monday 27 April 2020).
The government also released a privacy statement for the app. It can be found here.
As @postulate indicated, this Act is irrelevant as it is the government who produced the app. It doesn’t apply to the government.
The Assistance and Access Act 2018 allows the government to compel industry assistance to access information which may be subject of Commonwealth criminal investigations. It doesn’t compel the government to provide backdoor access to its own sotfware.
Again, this is a US law affecting US businesses. It doesn’t override Australian laws.
The US CLOUD Act cab requires a provider to produce stored electronic data within the provider’s “possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.”
The Australian government can also obtain such information either when publicly available for working with it’s counterparts in other countries (this happens all the time and @postulative example of sex tourism is one example where data is obtained from another country for Australian criminal action . The difference with the US legislation is that it does not need to work through other countries if the data is readily accessible by the US company in the US. It simplifies the process which existed before the legislation was enacted.
As I’ve said, the app is little more than marketing. Security theatre with the potential for misuse.
We’ve essentially been told to trust that the app works as advertised and will be used as promised.
In off-list discussion, I mentioned that the app supposedly stores details of “contacts” on the 'phone. A “contact” is said to be any other 'phone with the app that has been within 1.5 metres for more than 15 minutes (IIRC).
The techy-type to whom I was talking said no, the app stores details of all “handshakes”. Every 'phone with the app that comes close enough for a signal to be received. Proximity calculation is beyond the resources of any handset. Those calculations are done on the server.
Under conditions that could change at the whim of the minister, all of the data is sent to the server, where calculations are made to decide which “handshakes” qualify as “contacts”. All 'phones are different, so the stored data includes comprehensive details of the type, model, etc. Of further concern, environmental conditions are also recorded (necessary for distance calculation). From that, there’s potential to infer location.
This is well outside my expertise, so I’m not at all sure I understood it all.
Quite honestly, I think its more simple than that. The app doesnt work as advertised. But #scottyfrommarketing wants everyone back to their normal lives and hang the consequences. Which could potentially be pretty dire.
Yes. Government 1.1 will fix that.
[edit]
I just read the article. 
Proximity anything more than best guess based on RF signal strength (and all the variables that affect same) is beyond the capability of the handset with standard BLE afaik. Of course it would be possible to sample the signal strength at regular intervals to get a more stable average than a single snapshot; trivial for any modern phone. If they ‘need’ to send any of this raw data upstream for processing then one wonders what else is going with it? perhaps voice samples from each microphone? The code that has been reversed so far doesn’t support that level of sophistication, but apparently there are still reasons not to release the source …
For what it’s worth:
https://www.ag.gov.au/RightsAndProtections/Privacy/Pages/COVIDSafelegislation.aspx
I’m much less concerned about the privacy issues now I know the app doesn’t work. The States cant even access the data yet. its nuts.
https://risky.biz/covidsafeissues/
When the Apple/Google framework is in place, and if the government has the good sense to use that and get the app built on top, then it might have a chance of doing the job they are telling us it will do now.
We could also simply ensure our mobile devices have GPS turned on whenever we go out and about. It does require a more intensive database to hold the logged records and some grunt to reverse search by time and GPS near location matches.
Apple and Google simply need to share what they can collect already. Or do they anyway?
It’s not quite the same precision of closeness as perhaps Bluetooth, and a little vague when you go into high rise concerning which floor you are on.
Yes, it is good there is another option being developed. It is also as your link points out based on BlueTooth technology, as is the current COVIDsafe app. Will users trust Google and Apple any more if they deliver their version? Or is it that the same risks will be argued?
In the end don’t all users need to rely on Governments to also do the right thing if any contact tracing app is to be successful? That’s a political judgement we each make on the Government of the day, and not necessarily a critique of any app.
I have no idea. Having read the entire document from start to end, including the FAQs, I am prepared to trust that it will be OK. But if the Aus government does not rebuild the app to take advantage of the new BT protocols… then they aren’t serious about contact tracing.
There is a difference between not operational and doesn’t work. Currently trace data is being collected within the app on individual phone, but the state government who have the responsibility to manage the processing of the data to notify of potential COVID-19 contact, aren’t in a position to do the processing yet. This will come shortly.
There is also criticism that the app doesn’t measure distance between contacts and a result the app is more or less useless. This criticism is wrong as if say one implemented the recommended 1.5m, the risks of contracting the disease is reduced (not eliminated). If say one got notification when the state governments start processing received data from known COVID-19 infected individuals, there is still a risk albeit small, that one has been exposed to the infection. This could be through aerosols or touching contaminated surfaces even though one may have been 1.5m from everyone.
If one gets such a notification, one should reconsider coming into contact with high risk individuals (don’t visit age care facility or elderly family member) and be more conscious of one’s own health and symptoms. If one gets symptoms, medical advice/intervention and testing should be sought.
While not perfect nor confirms close contact with or one potentially has the infection, it is better than effectively sticking one head in the sand and not knowing anything… potentially spreading the disease causing death to our fellow high risk Australians. I wouldn’t want to live the rest of my life with this on my mind because I don’t do everything I could, including using the app, to assist in the diseases control.
It is obvious that some think their anti-app stance for various reasons is more important than protecting the health and lives of Australia’s most health vulnerable. I hope they realise the consequences if they become a disease host and spread it to others.
This is the best way to lose one’s potential privacy. History shows had Apple and Google actively collect data for their own commercial benefit. Any non-government app is likely to be a substantialy higher privacy risk.
I too hope they are serious about contact tracing using mobile devices for data collection. We are on such a fine line at present with the virus still active in the community. There is little assurance at present of the risk being eliminated in the near future.
Victoria’s 200,000 virus tests in two weeks program is underway. It will help clarify the extent and risks of undetected infections within a broader community, and some other concerns. It’s good that Victoria is holding off on any further changes for now.
Its a very thin line. As far as I am concerned, not operational means it is not working.
Distance has nothing to do with the arguments I have seen so far. It is all about the bluetooth and how iOS bluetooth and Android Bluetooth wil not talk to each other, which they need to, in order for both apps to work properly. But, thats apparently OK.
I don’t expect to get any notifications. IN this area there have been no new cases for 8 days, and there is only one remaining active case. And, since I venture out only rarely (and even less so since the beginning of February because I could see what was coming) I doubt I will get infected. I might, of course, but its not very likely.
They arent making an app. It a framework upon which others can build their own apps. eg CovidSafe. Its the Bluetooth framework and protocol that will be changed to allow just the government apps to talk to each other, and that will be for every device with or without a contact tracing app.
I’m as paranoid about google as anyone (more so than some) but I trust Apple with my data. I dont know how you think Apple uses it for commercial gain… no advertising, no third party selling, none of the stuff we see with google. I’ve never been spammed on my icloud accounts… the only objection I have to Apple is that they have tracked back to their old elitist stance and made their hardware unaffordable for the average person.
I’m not anti the app. I just want it to work, and it doesnt. Yet.
Have you been conned? Politicians and some medical professionals promote the app. Politicians because it’s good politics and medical professionals because they either believe or have been pressured. As mentioned above, even if the app can be made to work, it won’t necessarily do what we’ve been led to believe.
For mine, the harder Scotty from Marketing promotes, the less faith I have.
There is no evidence that it won’t work either. And of course there is no evidence as the app is new, not fully operational and results are yet to flow through.It will take some time before the results are in. Like many technologies, there is rational behind the basis for its functionality using bluetooth as a method to record proximity contacts.
Arguing there is ‘no evidence that a so-called “contact tracing” app will be a net benefit’ is pushing an agenda rather than trying to prevent an outbreak by using all available measures which are available. Arguing untested hypotheses of whether it does not don’t work does not assist the community in trying to stop the spread of the virus nor give it a chance to prove itself to ensure our most health vulnerable don’t die.
I am shocked that some community members are willing to potentially play Russian roulette with other Australian’s lives because they are anti-ScoMo, anti-government, etc. Having an agenda doesn’t protect one from the virus, as it doesn’t discriminate.
If it is proven successful and effective in say 3 months, those who chose not to install the app but have infected other fellow citizens leading to potential deaths will have to live with that for their rest of their lives. This is a live and death pandemic for some, and I am sure that those which are potentially high risk would want their fellow Australian to do all they can to protect their health.
That is a big if, based upon a fair proportion of the evidence. While I agree with the idea of doing things based upon community benefit (vaccines come to mind), the use of similar language to push something that is of far from proven benefit and offers enormous potential for risk is disingenuous.
The app is intended to at most complement manual contact tracing. It will not magically make contact tracing an easy task, nor will it remove any of the foot-slogging drudgery of contact investigations. The fact that it has multiple flaws is not encouraging; the impatience with which it has been rolled out when the operating system designers are weeks from releasing a proper solution gives one pause; the multiple question marks over its privacy, source code etc. give every reason for many of us to wait and see.
In the meantime, trying to shame people about ‘lives lost’ is at a minimum unhelpful and at worst likely to cause positions to harden.
