A technological white elephant put out to pasture

It was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all.

Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases that were not otherwise picked up by manual contact tracing during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in general, to work.

Launched in April 2020, the $21 million platform was heralded as a great public health tool. It constituted a digital arm in monitoring community transmission and infection.

Relying on Bluetooth signals transmitted at logged intervals to nearby users, those testing positive to COVID-19 would trigger a process by which state and territory authorities could request access to the phone to identify other potential contacts.