Ottawa has acknowledged and said it fixed a bug in the ArriveCAN app that sent messages to some travelers early last week telling them to quarantine even though they were fully vaccinated and not there were indications that they had COVID-19.
The warning was sent to about three percent of travelers and appears to have affected only Apple devices, according to the government.
Read more: ArriveCAN 2.0: Ottawa confirms controversial app will survive pandemic
“The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has identified a technical bug with the app that affected some users earlier this week, which could result in an erroneous notification telling people to self-quarantine,” he said. said government spokesman Alex Cohen in a written statement.
“It is important to emphasize that it is CBSA and (public health) officials, not enforcement, who determine whether an individual is subject to public health restrictions and must be quarantined.”
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The issue is among a growing list of concerns about the app and its continued mandatory use.
Canada’s border agents have said up to 40 percent of international travelers don’t have the app or don’t use it properly, contributing to long lines and delays. Ontario’s tourism industry has also warned the enforcement is hurting the economy by discouraging cross-border travel.
The government also recently revealed that it plans to maintain the app long after the pandemic ends, repurposing it as a pre-customs screening tool to speed up processing times at the border.
Read more: Border union says government statistics on ArriveCAN app ‘absolutely bogus’
The move has some privacy and technology experts worried that the government is using its emergency powers to push an agenda that has nothing to do with public health.
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And if ArriveCAN’s past performance is any indication, the app’s reliability could prove problematic even if the government reinvents it.
“The term I would use for this is dishonest,” said Brenda McPhail, director of privacy, technology and surveillance at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
‘Modernize’ the border
The government has long expressed a desire to “modernize cross-border travel” through greater digitization.
A strategy to achieve that goal was outlined in a 2019 report released by former Public Safety Secretary Ralph Goodale.
The CBSA also developed a stand-alone application several years ago that allows travelers to complete customs declarations online before arriving in Canada.
But uptake of the “CanBorder – eDeclaration” app was low, especially compared to ArriveCAN, which millions of Canadians were forced to download to re-enter the country during the pandemic.
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A comparison between the two apps in the Apple Store, for example, shows that eDeclaration has 318 total ratings, while ArriveCAN has nearly 500,000.
Global News asked the CBSA how many times the e-statement has been downloaded since it was launched. The agency did not respond to that question.
“The agency’s traveler modernization initiative was already underway when the pandemic struck,” CBSA spokeswoman Rebecca Purdy said in a written statement sent July 7.
“Due to Canadians’ familiarity with the ArriveCAN application and its widespread association with border processing, the CBSA chose to incorporate the advance declaration components being developed into (ArriveCAN) instead of the different intended application”.
McPhail was part of an advisory panel created to oversee the COVID Alert app, another piece of technology the government rolled out in July 2020 to slow the spread of COVID-19.
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He said that unlike ArriveCAN, which was developed in secret by contractors who had pre-existing relationships with the government, COVID Alert had checks and balances to ensure transparency and accountability.
Read more: Ottawa shuts down COVID alert app as pandemic eases in Canada
The COVID alert was developed in the open, McPhail said, the code was shared publicly, an expert advisory panel was created to oversee it, data was regularly released about how the app was being used, and promising to close the app if it proved ineffective, which it eventually did.
“When you do something in secret … there is absolutely no guarantee to the public that the process is the best,” McPhail said.
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Carole Piovesan, managing partner at INQ Law and co-chair of the COVID Alert advisory panel, said valuable lessons have been learned about transparency when developing the COVID Alert that can be applied to future technologies.
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He also said he would like to see more information shared publicly about how ArriveCAN is used.
That doesn’t necessarily mean sharing every detail or launching an advisory panel every time a new app is rolled out, but it does mean having a “sufficient public engagement strategy” to make sure any new technology lives up to expectations, he said. .
“We see that our government is obviously responsible, but also efficient,” Piovesan said. “If we can use the tools in a way that achieves accountability, good governance and efficiency, that’s what we want from a modern government.”
Read more: 96% of Canadians who test positive for coronavirus aren’t using the COVID Alert app correctly
Another major concern that experts raise about new technologies is the inability to demonstrate whether they work the way they are supposed to.
For example, there appears to be no way to independently verify whether the government’s fix for the recent ArriveCAN bug was successful. “The CBSA can certify that the issue was resolved by 6pm on 20 July. The fix was thoroughly tested by CBSA technical teams prior to implementation, as per standard procedures,” said CBSA spokeswoman Maria Ladouceur.
“ArriveCAN remains an important and mandatory tool that helps inform public health advice and is an integral part of Canada’s new variant monitoring program.”
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Phil Dawson, an expert on technology and artificial intelligence, said that governments and companies must be responsible for the products they release.
He said there are several nonprofits and private companies working to develop third-party verification tools for new technologies. But in general, software developers create new applications without any means of independently testing their effectiveness.
“What we really don’t have is visibility into the kinds of tools we need to check the technology, to measure its quality,” he said.
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.