A national COVID-19 contact tracing app will launch in Ontario in the next two weeks.
The app called "COVID Alert" will notify the user if their phone has been in the proximity of another person with the app who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Once the user receives the notification, they can contact public health about the next steps to take.
"If your phone gets in proximity for a certain amount of time at a certain closeness to another phone, it will register that it has had contact with that anonymized number, not a phone number but an anonymized identifier for the app," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "A few days later if that person that you were in proximity with tested positive you will get a notification to reach out to your local health services."
Trudeau assures Canadians that the app is completely confidential and respectful of privacy rights. It does not use location services or geo-tagging of any kind. Instead, there will be a database of randomized codes that are linked to each smartphone, this code will be used to indicate whether the person with that phone has tested positive for the virus.
"There are no identifiers of your phone, of your number, of your identity or your address or even of your location that is any part of this app. A random code that is associated with your phone will be held in a secure national database that will be consulted by the apps across the country to see whether that randomized code has tested positive for COVID or not," said Trudeau.
The Ontario government will be the first to link the app to the public health system so that once a person tests positive, the app can be notified if the person has the app downloaded and consents to the notification. The app will be available for download across the province, however, the federal government is still working with individual provinces to link the app to public health systems.
The more people who download the app, the more effective it will be for contact tracing and containing the virus.
