Canadian tracing app ready for testing: PM

OTTAWA — A made-in-Canada mobile app to alert Canadians who might have been exposed to person infected with COVID-19 is ready for testing in Ontario, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.

Trudeau said using the app is voluntary and it will not share or store any personal information, including a user’s geographical location.

“It will be up to individual Canadians to decide whether to download the app or not, but the app will be most effective when as many people as possible have it.”

The app was developed by Canadian Digital Service, Ontario Digital Service, Blackberry and volunteers from Shopify who helped build it. The app uses Bluetooth software. It creates and shares an anonymous identification code from your phone to any phone that also has the app and comes into close proximity with your own. Your phone will also collect codes from those phones and store them for 14 days.

If you, or any of those phone owners, are diagnosed with COVID-19, public health officials will help you upload that fact to the app, and any phones that were logged by yours in the previous 14 days will receive a notification that the user might have been exposed to COVID-19. Those users will be asked to contact health authorities for help.

Trudeau said the federal privacy commissioner was involved in the development and every consideration has been given to protecting privacy because the government is very aware that if Canadians are worried about their privacy they won’t use the app.

The app will run in the background and not eat up much battery power.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford urged people in his province to download it to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

Trudeau said the government is working with all provinces, and that the program should be ready for downloading across the country in July.