Criminal negligence? The IATF’s contact-tracing app #StateSurveillance #StaySafe

We were promised a bombshell last week, during yet another late Monday night gibberish session with Duterte. But the real deal happened a day after.

An aside: there are no bombshells to be dropped when your own comms team deletes the part where you say you won’t run if your daughter will, and then your own daughter discredits you and destroys your party’s credibility, but of course she herself is part of that circus. End of aside.

The real bomb was exploded in the Senate inquiry of the Department of Health, which might be borne of the Commission on Audit reports, but in fact has been an opportunity for us to understand better why we are in such deep pandemic shit at this point, not just given Covid spread, but more importantly, Duterte’s failed public health response.

Between Senator Joel Villanueva asking about contact tracing as the weakest link in Covid response, and Senator Pia Cayetano asking specifically about the StaySafePH App, we heard DOH Secretary Duque—he with the least amount of credibility, and the most kapal-ng-mukha—admit that the Stay Safe App is practically useless.

“I think it’s very limited, almost no impact,” said the DOH secretary.

Now Duque might be the man who just admitted that the government’s official contact tracing app is useless, but a little research and you realize that for this one it’s not just Duque’s head that we should be calling for. It’s the men in the IATF itself—the task force that’s supposed to address Covid-19 and ensure our survival—as it does lead straight to Duterte.

Former DICT Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. had dropped that other bomb as early as April 2020, two months into this pandemic.

The problems with Stay Safe
Just as this pandemic had started, former Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. had talked about the StaySafe app as the reason behind his having been “eased out” of government in May 2020. In a series of Facebook posts, he details how despite concerns about the app, and despite what he knew would be its uselessness, it had remained as the “the IATF-chosen” contact tracing app for the country.

In May 2020, a little over two months into this pandemic, Rio had the most basic, most important questions about Stay Safe. First was how it only worked (at least at that time) on 3G capable phones, which is a major problem when one considers that, according to Rio, it would only be used by 1% of the population, what with over 20 million Filipinos using 2G devices.

His suggestion was to use a combination of different apps that would be useful for the kind of massive contact tracing we needed to be able to do. Note that in May 2020, three months into this pandemic, we needed to do this well, with very little space for mistakes.

The other problem with StaySafe is that it is primarily a surveillance app, not a contact tracing app. This means that it is a threat to citizens’ privacy, as it is also useless unless you will have the app on 24/7, allowing the app to track your every move.

Despite these critical concerns, in April 2020, Malacañang announced that Stay Safe was the country’s “official social distancing, health condition reporting, and contact tracing system,” with the Department of Transportation chiming in that it would use the app for contact tracing in public transport—never mind the fact that not everyone will have the phone for it, or the internet to keep the app connected at all times.

MultiSys itself, the developer of Stay Safe, admitted it needed to have “more than 50 million registrations to be fully effective to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).” This is because for the app to work for contact tracing, a person who’s infected, as well as all her contacts, will need to have the app on their phones.

Common sense tells us this was not going to work.

Stay Safe and reckless endangerment
In mid-June 2020, Secretary Rio highlighted for us how useless and irrelevant Stay Safe was at a time when the Covid numbers were growing.

“As of June 12, 2020 there are 24,787 total number of Covid-19 cases as per DOH report. However, not one of these people have a cell phone with a StaySafe app. In other words, since StaySafe was made the official contact tracing app of the government on April 29 2020, it has NEVER been used for contract tracing <emphasis mine>. This is mainly because for the two months after its selection, it was only able to register a little more than 1 million users. So out of a population of 107 million, only around 0.93% Filipinos have the StaySafe on their phones. The chances therefore of an infected person having a phone with the app is less than 1%, and the chances that this person coming in contact with another person, also with a phone with the app, is almost zero.”

In classic Duterte fashion though, MultiSys decided to blame Filipinos for the app’s failure to do its job, because we were not downloading and installing the app on our phones:  “We Filipinos don’t trust each other anymore. <…> StaySafe was built to save lives. If Filipinos start trusting Filipinos, I think Filipinos will use it.”

The truth is, it’s not that we do not trust each other. It’s that (1) we do not trust this government, and certainly will not trust an app that violates our right to privacy, and (2) not all of us will have the phones or internet access that will allow us to use this app at all.

The latter was enough reason for the IATF to disapprove this app. Instead it deliberately chose Stay Safe, and has stuck to it the past 18 months. Which means that this government has not only failed at contact tracing, but has ENSURED that it will not provide us with proper, efficient, and credible contact tracing at a time when our lives depend on it.

 This part is not just reckless endangerment. It looks more like criminal negligence. ***