The NZ COVID-19 Tracer App

Since Tuesday 19^th May the New Zealand government’s official ‘NZ COVID-19 Tracer’ app has been available for download. This first iteration, though, is little more than the promised sign-up form Jacinda Ardern told us about in early April when she said, “it will help update our national health database with users' contact details.”

Apart from ensuring our details are up-to-date, the other official benefit is that people get used to scanning themselves into premises.

Having available an electronic list of places visited will be a memory aid to assist us in case we test positive, but it will not do much to ‘protect your friends, whānau and community by enabling faster contact tracing’ as the download page states.

The Director of the Centre for Social Data Analytics, Dr Rhema Vaithianathan, tweeted on the night the app became available, “This makes no sense - how does it help moh [Ministry of Health] locate contacts that have visited the same place as the case? Am I missing something here??”

She wasn’t. The app cannot help with locating people who were in the same premises that a person with a COVID-19 positive test visited. The only way to help with that is a register but under Lockdown Level 2 it is only hospitality places that must keep a register.

Here’s a possible scenario:

A Wellingtonian has the afternoon off work and spends 40 minutes taking a bus into town, an hour browsing at a book shop which includes sitting on a chair and chatting with a stranger, followed by another hour browsing in another shop and then finally dinner at a restaurant for another hour with a group of friends before taking the bus home.

A few days later they test positive for COVID-19. They’re phoned by an official Ministry of Health Contact Tracer and using the results on the app can tell that person where they’d been earlier in the week. But the only data that is going to be any good for contact tracing is the dinner with the friends. The restaurant is a hospitality business so they have a register. The Contact Tracer can contact the restaurant and get the names of all the other customers who were there at the same time as the infected person.

The people on the bus, the other customers and browsers at shops that either came into direct contact with the positive person or were in the premises at the same time, cannot be contacted.

If the only data that gets shared with the contact tracer is from the person with the positive test, the app cannot help with close contact tracing. Which is why after criticism and questioning, Ashley Bloomfield admitted that, “Bluetooth tracing capability could be added in a June update.”

He has also said, “In the next release, NZ COVID Tracer will be able to notify you if you have been at the same location at the same time as someone who has COVID-19 and will allow you to send your digital diary directly to the National Close Contact Service." Marc Daalder, a Newsroom journalist, has also reported that “The app will eventually have a daily health check-in feature.” A feature which already exists on the Government's official WhatsApp channel. These are different developments and technologies. 

The open endedness is unacceptable. Future plans for the app need to be made public. Like most apps, the majority of people will automatically or blindly update the application without realising the consequences.

We need to have open discussions now about this app. We need to be considering the possible consequences of normalising tracking and tracing weighed up against any benefits. But most importantly, we need to ask if an app is really the answer.

We need to think about the future. COVID-19 is here now and will probably be around for at least a few more years. It is also likely that other pandemics will appear and we need to prepare for that prospect.

Rather than looking to technology for an answer to assist human contact tracers, could that time and money not be better spent on healthcare, housing and communities? Wouldn’t it be better in the long-term to improve the general public health so that fewer people are vulnerable? Improve systems and communities so we can cope with sudden increases of people needing urgent medical attention? Have warm and safe homes for all before there is a sudden need to self-isolate or lockdown whole communities again? A universal basic income is also a good idea.

This first release of NZ COVID-19 Tracer is a tool getting us used to tracking. The next release will be tracing. We are building a possible architecture of surveillance. Open and transparent discussion is needed now before we advance any further.