First announced in late March, the HSE’s Covid-19 contact/exposure tracing app was based on a seemingly simple idea - use a smartphone’s wireless sensors to identify when a person had been near to someone with Covid-19.
The app could then warn that they may be at greater risk of infection, making the work of the HSE’s contact tracing team much easier.
Similar to an app launched in Singapore a week earlier, the HSE’s version was supposed to arrive within days of its announcement, and would be an important tool in the country’s fight against the virus.
Bu two months - and multiple target dates - later, it is still not available.
Of note to privacy experts too is the fact that, weeks after being unveiled, very little is still known about the app and its features.
"It’s very hard to say [if there are privacy issues] without having clear details of what the app will do," said Dr Paolo Palmieri, lecturer in cyber security at University College Cork.
"The fact that the specifications are not available is a problem in itself. It may be the case because they’re not fully-defined yet, but I would prefer the code [of the app] or at the very least a very detailed specification of how the application works.
The continued lack of information is also an issue for Daragh O’Brien, managing director of privacy and information governance advisory firm Castlebridge.
"The first concern about the Covid app, as we know of what it is at the moment, is that we don’t actually know what it is at the moment," he said.
It's a relatively simple concept in theory ..
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