The COVIDSafe App in Australia: Success or Failure?

Abstract: The COVIDSafe contact tracing app was launched in Australia in April 2020 as a way to reduce the transmission of COVID among citizens. The Australian App was based on the Singaporean TraceTogether App and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and BlueTrace.io protocol standard. The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) of the Australian Government was in charge of procurement and deployment of COVIDSafe which has received widespread criticism for its failure to work correctly and effectively. After several attempts to get a working product to market for social securitization, the Australian Government opted to venture into discussions with Apple and Google in a bid to get a working product to market. Meanwhile, the original COVIDSafe was riddled with bugs and came under immense scrutiny from privacy and security scholars and practitioners in Australia. Some have declared COVIDSafe a failure, while others are imploring Australians to give it a go, despite a plateauing of a second wave of COVID-19 in Victoria, where the App was abandoned for a period of time by State Health officials. What does the future hold for these kinds of Apps? This presentation will describe a number of sociotechnical dimensions to understanding emerging technologies and services.

Presenters:

Katina Michael is a professor at Arizona State University, holding a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing, Informatics and Decisions Systems Engineering. She is also the director of the Society Policy Engineering Collective (SPEC) and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. Katina is a senior member of the IEEE and a Public Interest Technology advocate who studies the social implications of technology. She has held 13 annual workshops in the social implications of national security space and chaired 3 international symposia on technology and society (ISTAS) in Wollongong, Toronto and Phoenix. She is the Senior Editor of the socio-economic impact section in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine and was the editor in chief of the award-winning IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. In 2019 she took on the role of working group chair for the IEEE P2089 standard. In 2017, she received the Brian M. O'Connell SSIT Distinguished Service Award. In the 1990s, Katina was employed as a senior network planner at Nortel Networks and systems analyst at Andersen Consulting and OTIS. In 2002 she entered academia as a lecturer at the University of Wollongong and in 2013 became a member of the executive team in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences as the Associate Dean – International, overseeing 8 partner and twinning arrangements for the University in the UAE, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Katina completed a Masters degree in transnational crime prevention in the Faculty of Law with a UOW postgraduate scholarship in 2007, and was later invited to teach cybercrime in the law school. Her PhD was on systems of innovation in the automatic identification industry.

Roba Abbas is a lecturer with the School of Management, Operations and Marketing at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Over the last 10 years, she has taught students from across disciplines, including in the Faculty of Informatics; the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, and her home base, the Faculty of Business and Law. She has a PhD in location-based services regulation and has received internationally competitive and local grants for research addressing global challenges in areas related to co-design and sociotechnical systems, operations management, robotics, social media and other emerging technologies. From 2005 to 2010, she was a product manager with Internetrix, Wollongong. Her current research interests include methodological approaches to complex socio-technical systems design. Roba was the Associate Editor for the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine between 2016 and 2020, and is presently the Co-Editor of the new transdisciplinary publication, the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. Roba has volunteered with the IEEE in various roles for over a decade. She is the Technical Program Chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS20) to be held in Arizona, USA in November 2020. She is also involved with the IEEE Standards Association, and is currently the IEEE Australia Council Student Activities Coordinator.

Citation: Katina Michael and Roba Abbas, 1 October 2020, “The COVIDSafe App in Australia: Success or Failure?”, in Robert Gutzwiller, ASU Human Systems Engineering Brown Bag Series, CHART, GSI, https://www.katinamichael.com/seminars/2020/10/1/the-covidsafe-app-in-australia-success-or-failure