CEO says her contact-tracing app will protect users’ privacy
Fay Arjomandi is president and CEO of Vancouver-based mimik technology, which has developed the Pandimik app. It’s the world’s first “anonymized” COVID-19 infection-tracing and positioning system, preserving confidentiality by not passing any information to the cloud, corporations, or governments.
Georgia Straight: What went through your mind when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the federal government will begin testing a new contact-tracing app?
Fay Arjomandi: I was encouraged, concerned, confused, and disappointed. Encouraged because I think we need a contacttracing app; concerned because I’m not sure how the app announced by the prime minister will protect citizens’ privacy rights. I was confused because I couldn’t figure out the role of Shopify, which is one of the largest cloud-based shopping platforms. What part of the application are they developing and what part of the data is shared in that application and with whom?
I was disappointed why the government didn’t assess the plausibility of utilizing other technology solutions from innovative and disruptive players such as the hybrid-edge cloud approach by mimik.
GS: What needs to be done to ensure this federal app will protect privacy?
FA: Citizens should be able to delete the app and disable any privacy back doors in the operating system; this is why some countries have decided to avoid the approach from Google and Apple.
For any app to be effective it needs to be adopted by 60 to 70 percent of the population. And people will only use it if they know for sure their data is safe and no one is tracking them. In other words, no contact-tracing information should ever be sent to the cloud and nobody other than the user of the app should be able to access the data that is on their device.
GS: What’s been the experience of contact-tracing apps for COVID-19 in other countries?
FA: As far as I know, to date, contact tracing in all countries has been a failure. Many governments have given up or are in the process of redesigning their apps. The experience has varied from extreme violation of privacy by constant surveillance in countries like Bahrain, Norway, and Singapore to highly ineffective with little adoption in countries like Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.