COVIDSafe app decommissioned as health department urges Australians to delete it
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App once dubbed the most important in Australia and our ticket out of lockdown meets sad end as millions are urged to delete it
- The Health Department has decommissioned the COVIDSafe contact app
- Information released last year found it was only used to find 17 close contacts
- Health Minister Mark Butler said the app cost taxpayers a whopping $21millionĀ
- The decommissioned comes almost a year after COVIDSafe was last updatedĀ
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The coronavirus app once dubbed our ticket out of lockdown has met a sad end, as the federal government announces it is wiping the controversial $21million COVIDSafe tracking program after just two years.Ā
COVIDSafe users were notified on Tuesday night that the app was being decommissioned and were instructed to delete it from their phones.
‘COVIDSafe is being decommissioned. The app is no longer being used in contact tracing,’ the notification read.
The federal government has decommissioned its multi-million-dollar coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe after just over two years of use
Users of the COVIDSafe app received a notification on Tuesday night telling them to delete it from their devices
‘This update removes functionality of the app so no information is stored or collected. This will enable the decommission process of COVIDSafe.’
The closure of the controversial app, brought in by Scott Morrison’s government in an attempt to trace Covid cases after the pandemic hit in early 2020, was signed off by Health Minister Mark Butler at the end of July.
Mr Butler said the app cost taxpayers a whopping $21million but was only used to identify two positive Covid cases throughout the entire pandemic.
COVIDSafe was launched by the Morrison Government in April 2020 as a response to the early phases of the Covid pandemic
‘This failed app was a colossal waste of more than $21 million of taxpayers money,’ he said.
‘This is a trademark of the former Government, which treated taxpayer’s money like their own.Ā
‘The former prime minister said this app would be our “sunscreen” against Covid – all it did was burn through taxpayers’ money.Ā
‘This failed app only found two unique positive COVID cases at the cost of more than $10 million each.’
Health Minister Mark Butler signed off on the COVIDSafe app’s decommissioning in July, notingĀ the app was ‘no longer required to prevent or control; the entry, emergence, establishment or spread’ of Covid
The COVIDSafe app faced heavy criticism when it was first launched, with people arguing an app designed to track the population’s location was a breach of privacy.
There were also concerns the information collected could be accessed or sold to a third party.
However, as restrictions eased and stores removed their QR check-in codes the app was largely unused and forgotten about by most of the population.Ā
The decommission comes almost a year after the app’s last update.