First Canadian province launches govt tracing app for coronavirus, over 10K voluntarily download

By Anthony Murdoch

According to the government of Alberta’s website, ‘[i]f you’re exposed to COVID-19, Alberta Health Services (AHS) will use information from ABTraceTogether to contact you.’

(LifeSiteNews) — Alberta is the first Canadian province to launch a coronavirus contact tracing application. Since launching a week ago, the app has been reportedly downloaded by voluntary users more than 120,000 times, which would amount to about 3 percent of the province’s population of four million.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) ABTraceTogether app was created from open-source software called BlueTrace which comes from Singapore.

According to the government of Alberta’s website, “[i]f you’re exposed to COVID-19, Alberta Health Services (AHS) will use information from ABTraceTogether to contact you on the number you used to register your account. AHS contact tracers will tell you about your risk of exposure and the actions you should take.”

“If you get COVID-19, you’ll be asked to volunteer your ABTraceTogether logs so other users that you’ve had close contact with can be notified,” the website states.

“The more Albertans who voluntarily download and use the app, the safer we’ll be, and the faster we can reopen the economy,” the website adds.

In early April, the premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, stated that quarantine orders would be strongly enforced with the help of contact tracing apps in the name of combating the coronavirus.

Kenney said his government would model its new app after similar contact tracing apps used in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

“We want to know if that person’s actually going to go home, and stay home and if not, we can deal with that individual before they spread the virus,” Kenney said on April 8 in the Alberta Legislature.

Jay Cameron, a lawyer for the Alberta-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), told LifeSiteNews that the legal group is closely keeping an eye on government-issued contact tracing apps.

“We are watching carefully and remain concerned about the slippery slope and government comfort with accessing and utilizing personal data,” said Cameron.

Earlier in the month, Cameron told LifeSiteNews that observing people via a smartphone app constitutes a search.

“Monitoring someone’s whereabouts using their cell phones is, of course, a search,” said Cameron.

Although Alberta is the only province with a contact tracing app thus far, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan are in the planning stages of potentially launching their own.

full story at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/first-canadian-province-launches-govt-tracing-app-for-coronavirus-over-10k-voluntarily-download

Categorised in: Canadian News