Health Canada said on Friday it would close its COVID Alert contact tracking app two years ago after changes to test rules in many provinces made it useless for many Canadians.
The Globe and Mail first reported on the federal government’s plans earlier this week. The app had only been downloaded by 6.9 million people when the federal government stopped publishing usage numbers last February.
In a press release Friday morning, Health Canada said the app would be shut down immediately and users would be able to delete the app from their devices.
[Ottawa to announce the end of troubled COVID Alert app this week, sources say]
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Brenda McPhail, who oversees the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s privacy and technology practice, had previously been with the Ottawa Advisory Group to oversee the application and sent a letter to officials in early May urging them to turn it off.
“Good management of public technology and responsible innovation require the government to manage and maintain the application for the duration of the project, including the liquidation of the application and the removal of associated data, now that it is no longer compliant. the stated purpose, “said Dr. McPhail wrote, according to a copy of the letter he shared with The Globe and Mail.
COVID Alert relied on Canadians who received positive infection notifications from PCR tests to receive unique codes from health authorities and voluntarily post them on the application. Any other user who had been near the infected person for more than 15 minutes should then be notified.
But British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon and Nunavut chose not to use the app, while Canadians only uploaded 57,704 codes in February, despite the country facing more than three million infections at the time. That number is now close to four million.
Interest in the app sank further due to the increase in the Omicron variant of COVID-19 late last year. The swarm of infections caused many health authorities to stop relying on government-backed PCR testing and start distributing mass antigen rapidly. The results of these home tests are less accurate than PCR tests and are difficult, if not impossible, to collect for health authorities.
Ottawa had always planned to shut down the application when the pandemic ceased, but rising new variants and stagnant vaccination rates have caused governments around the world to move from trying to end the pandemic to learning to live together. safe.
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