The government-endorsed Stay Safe app is ineffective in COVID-19 contact tracing but could be used for surveillance, former Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Undersecretary Eliseo Rio said Saturday (June 13).
Rio, whose resignation was accepted by President Rodrigo Duterte in May, questioned in a Facebook post why the government made Stay Safe the official contact tracing app when he proposed vetting several apps for the task.
He said Stay Safe is ineffective because it can only be used by people with smartphones. As of June, Rio said a little over a million people have downloaded the app, or less than one percent of the country’s 107 million population.
“The chances therefore of an infected person having a phone with the app is less than 1%, and the chances that this person coming in contact with another person, also with a phone with the app, is almost zero. To improve these chances, at least 60% of the population or 64.2 million must have StaySafe in their phones,” Rio said.
“At the rate of a million registered within two months, it will take more than 10 years for StaySafe to become effective,” he added.
Rio flagged the Stay Safe app for the permissions, or privileges it asks from a user upon downloading the app.
“The only permission needed is just the locator tracker for contact tracing, yet the developer insists to have a number of permissions like access to the phone’s camera and to modify and delete content in your phone’s storage. People are not properly informed that when you register to StaySafe, these permissions are by default granted. Is this to please the main sponsor of StaySafe who is involved in intelligence?” he asked.
A few weeks before leaving his post, Rio said he proposed a COVID-19 central platform which will use apps and other technology for contact tracing. He said it was possible to do the job without an app by utilizing the call details recording (CDR) of telcos, which will involve accessing the phone’s locations through the user’s call logs.
“From there I can get the numbers of other phones that may have close contact with those having virus cases, and send them text messages to have themself tested in a scheduled place, date and time. Absolutely no apps needed, no privacy issues, it will work with any phone, and I could have results within a week. This will then be used to support the contact tracing program of DOH (Department of Health),” he said.
While Rio’s proposal was supported by ICT Secretary Gringo Honasan and National Task Force (NTF) COVID-19 Chief Implementor Secretary Carlito Galvez, Jr., Rio said the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Diseases (IATF) chose Stay Safe instead for contact tracing.
“[N]o reason was given why the Covid-19 Central Platform I initiated was not approved and my resignation approved almost simultaneously,” he said.
StaySafe is developed by local tech firm Multisys Technologies Corporation. Businessman Manny Pangilinan, through PLDT, owns a 46-percent stake in the company.
Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment