SYDNEY: Australia will make it illegal for non-health officials to access data collected on smartphone software to trace the spread of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday , amid privacy concerns raised by the measure.
The tracing app, which is yet to be released, has raised concerns from legal and privacy advocates who have said the location data it collects may be used by unrelated bodies like law enforcement agencies.Advertisement Morrison also confirmed a local media report which said the data would be stored on servers managed by AWS, a unit of US internet giant Amazon.com, but added that"it's a nationally encrypted data store".The promise of laws to limit use of the app came as the Australian authorities reported another day of low single-digit percentage increases of the illness, which has infected about 6,700 people and resulted in 78 deaths in the country.
The country's state governments began urging people to come forward for testing, saying they no longer needed to meet previous criteria of having been in contact with an infected person, having been abroad, or experiencing flu-like symptoms.A cruise ship linked to a third of the country's coronavirus deaths left the country on Thursday after a month docked in local waters.