Australia has launched a smartphone app to trace people who come in contact with coronavirus patients despite privacy concerns that authorities insisted Sunday were unwarranted.

The COVIDSafe app uses a phone's Bluetooth wireless signal to store information about people's interactions, and can be accessed by health officials if a person contracts coronavirus.

Australia's chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said the app would speed up a "laborious process" for health authorities tracking down users who have been within 1.5 metres of someone who has the virus.

"What this will do is give a list of the mobile phone numbers of those people who have been in contact within that distance for 15 minutes or more," he said.

"That could lead to someone being contacted a day or two earlier than they otherwise may have been."

Australia has recorded just over 6,700 cases of COVID-19 and 83 deaths from the virus.

The rise in infections has slowed considerably in recent weeks, with just 16 new cases recorded across the country Sunday.

Health officials say widespread take-up of the app would help them to ease tough restrictions on movement and gatherings. Just under half of Australia's population would need to download the program for it to be an effective tool.

The app is free and sign-up is voluntary, despite initial suggestions it could be made mandatory.

In an effort to alleviate privacy concerns, users can provide a fake name and police cannot access the data to investigate crimes, while all information is automatically deleted after 21 days.

"What we have done is strip back the function so it has one job and one job alone and that is that if you are positive, to be able to make that available only to the state public health authorities, with nobody else having access," health minister Greg Hunt said.

Singapore pioneered the use of coronavirus tracing apps, and work on implementing digital contact tracing is underway in France, Germany, Britain and elsewhere.

In the United States, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden cited contact tracing as part of a plan "to safely reopen America" along with expanded testing and other steps.

In U-turn, Germany backs Google and Apple on virus app
Frankfurt Am Main (AFP) April 26, 2020 - The German government on Sunday switched to backing a coronavirus-tracing app using technology supported by Google and Apple, ditching a German-led alternative that had come under fire over privacy concerns.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn and Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff Helge Braun said Berlin was now in favour of a "decentralised software architecture" that would see user data stored on people's own phones instead of on a central database.

"Our goal is for the tracing app to be ready for use very soon and with strong acceptance from the public and civil society," Spahn and Braun said in a joint statement.

The rollout of an app that would use bluetooth to alert smartphone users when they have been in contact with someone infected with the virus is considered crucial in the fight against the pandemic as countries like Germany relax their lockdowns.

Berlin has until now thrown its weight behind a pan-European app known as PEPP-PT being developed by some 130 European scientists, including experts from Germany's Fraunhofer research institute and Robert Koch Institute public health body.

But the proposed app had faced growing criticism over its plan to store data on a central server.

Critics said it would allow governments to hoover up personal information and could lead to mass state surveillance.

In an open letter earlier this week, some 300 leading academics urged governments to dismiss the centralised approach, saying it risked undermining public trust.

They said an approach being developed by Apple and Google, whose operating systems run most of the world's smartphones, was more privacy friendly.

The tech giants plan to collaborate with apps, like the Swiss-led DP-3T, that use a decentralised system, which would see data stored on individual devices.

The European Commission has also recommended that data harvested through coronavirus contact-tracing apps should be stored only on users' own phones and be encrypted.

The German government has repeatedly stressed that the use of any coronavirus app would be voluntary and anonymous, in a country still haunted by the spying of the Nazi era and the former East German secret police.

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