COVID-19 apps in Singapore and Australia: reimagining healthy nations with digital technology

Abstract

Widely and intensively used digital technologies have been an important feature of international responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. One especially interesting class of such technologies are dedicated contact and tracing apps collecting proximity data via the Bluetooth technology. In this article, I consider the development, deployment and imagined uses of apps in two countries: Singapore, a pioneer in the field, with its TraceTogether app, and Australia, a country that adapted Singapore’s app, devising its own COVIDSafe, as key to its national public health strategy early in the crisis. What is especially interesting about these cases is the privacy concerns the apps raised, and how these are dealt with in each country, also the ways in which each nation reimagines its immediate social future and health approach via such an app.

Health Care Students’ Knowledge of and Attitudes, Beliefs, and Practices Toward the French COVID-19 App: Cross-sectional Questionnaire Study

“…A study exploring the real uptake of an existing app in Singapore, the TraceTogether app, had an uptake of 20% [ 25 ]. This higher percentage, compared to our study, might be justified by the fact that Asian countries are often referred to for their decisive and authoritative responses to pandemics.…”

“…Distrust in data security and fear of being geolocated were mentioned by our sample as the fourth reason for not downloading the app (33/210, 15.7%). Researchers worldwide, from Europe to Asia, have emphasized the privacy controversies of contact tracing apps, presenting them as the main fault of this type of technology [ 9 , 17 , 22 , 25 , 38 ]. Fears of greater surveillance and that the app might be hacked are mentioned in these studies as barriers to app use.…”

“…Some studies are based on surveys assessing the uptake of these apps among different population samples. These studies mostly refer to a hypothetical app and the intention to use it [ 16 - 24 ], and only a few collect information on the use of an existing tool like StopCovid [ 25 - 27 ]. The majority of documents reporting the real uptake of contact tracing apps are national statistics without a scientific and theoretical background.…”

Comparative analysis of China’s Health Code, Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s COVID Tracer Surveillance Apps: a new corona of public health governmentality?

“…The first version of COVIDSafe was available for download in Australian App stores for iOS and Android devices 12 days later, with later updates in regional app stores to open functionality to international people in Australia. It should also be noted that the government’s repeated stated vision of COVIDSafe was focused as much on enabling economic activities insofar it is related to public health (Goggin, 2020), which mirrors the Morrison government’s more general messaging on threats to Australia from the pandemic.…”

“…But the pandemic was also framed in unprecedented dire economic terms, as manifest in a hitherto unseen spike of unemployment, recession and fears of further outbreaks collapsing economic activity (which had been ‘paused’) all together (Farr, 2020). In light of this, a variety of app-based surveillance technologies were used by states to frame a recovery of both economy and public health through solutions that stopped the spread and allowed individual quarantines to be lifted, and thus return to robust and ‘healthy’ economic activity (Goggin, 2020). In contrast to the extraordinary COVID-19 public health needs, more ordinary app-based public health ‘surveillance’ initiatives included ideas around epidemiological data gathering by survey response (Navin et al, 2017) and various health promotion programmes (Lee et al, 2018).…”