• The federal government’s COVIDsafe app has been downloaded by more than 2 million Australians in just 24 hours.
• The tracing app is intended to be used by health departments to identify those who have come into contact with a confirmed coronavirus case.
• It requires 10 million downloads to be entirely effective.
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No one could have predicted a few months ago the hottest Australian app of 2020 would be one released by the federal government.

Having only released it on Sunday, the government’s coronavirus tracing app COVIDsafe had already racked up more than 2 million downloads by Monday evening.

The uptake appears to have far surpassed government expectations with more than 1.3 million downloads within the first 12 hours.

“We had hoped that perhaps we would get to the million mark within five days and we were lucky to get there within five hours,” Health Minister Greg Hunt told a press conference on Monday morning.

“Australians, just as they have done throughout the course of the virus, have responded magnificently.”

Using a phone’s Bluetooth, the app is designed to identify users who spend more than 15 minutes within 1.5 metres of each other. When there’s a confirmed case of COVID-19, the anonymised data is then supposed to help health departments trace anyone that has recently come into contact with the patient, thus helping restrict its transmission.

“It is about helping find those people who might have been exposed to the virus, who might otherwise never have realised they had been in contact with someone and that can save their lives or our nurses, or our doctors, or prevent the virus from getting into an aged care home or a health facility,” Hunt said.

While some questions still remain regarding a state-owned app designed to hoover up an individual’s data, the government appears to have convinced much of the country of both its necessity and its security. Scott Morrison and his ministers have been at pains to emphasise that the data will only be accessible by state and territory health departments, anonymised, and used solely for the purpose of containing COVID-19.

“The information that is collected from that app goes into a national data store that is fully encrypted and the Commonwealth Government has no access whatsoever to the information into that data store. None. Zero. Zip. Nothing,” Morrison said last week.

“That information can only be unlocked by the health officer at the state and territory level in direct communication with the person from whom, who has contracted the coronavirus in releasing that information into the data store. Now, that’s how it works. It’s got one job. Just one job.”

In a world dominated by Facebook and Google — both of which are also releasing their own tracing tools — another app hoovering up personal data hardly appears to be a concern to those early adopters. However, the government has acknowledged it will need 10 million downloads nationally to ensure the efficacy of the app.

At this rate, however, it may just get them signed up by the weekend.

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