Don't mention the cost or all the non-covid data it collected.
CovidSafe was supposed to be the solution to stopping the virus spreading in Australia. The authorities demanded that everyone download the app and act immediately if they were alerted.
The app was introduced by the Morrison government in 2020 to great fanfare, but now has been quietly 'decommissioned' after a Senate select committee branded it an expensive failure and admitted that the governments hadn’t been using it for months.
Users opening the app are now greeted with the message “Please uninstall COVIDSafe”. meaning the app will likely stay on the person's phone, forgotten about, happily still tracking their whereabouts, logging who they are meeting and where they are going, just not logging any virus transmission, which some say was never the real intention of the app anyway.
On Wednesday, Health Minister Mark Butler said the app did little but burn through money, but failed to mention the huge amounts of non-covid data that it collected that has been used by the surveillance state.
Cost $21 million and detected just TWO cases
Butler said that the App had cost $21 Million and had 7.9 million users, but had actually only found two unique Covid cases and therefore would be 'decommissioned'.
The app ushered in the surveillance state
The app was reportedly designed to aid contact tracers by determining the people who had been near someone with COVID-19 but privacy campaigners quickly pointed out that in order to do that the app was tracking a person's every move as well as who they were friends with, their comings and goings, as well as a whole host of other private details being past back to the Government they had no right to have.
Total Access to Apple phones
'Technical limitations' for Apple uses were overcome by the Government saying that iphones users must keep their phones unlocked at all times for the App to work. This secretly enabled the app to extract thousands of other pieces of data, none of which were anything to do with Covid.
Authorities have refused to mention what they did with all the other data they collected, or if they app isn't actively removed, if it continues to collect non-covid data. Privacy experts maintain that the app created a detailed file on every citizen that listed their friends, associates, travel patterns, shopping habits and even political affiliations and now that the information has been gathered the app is no longer required whilst the government maintain that the innocent app was merely to help with infection rates and simply didn't work.
www.visionnews.online
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