Functionality woes impede Abtracetogether app

The in-depth report released Thursday on the Abtracetogether app by Alberta’s privacy watchdog is a good step, but there are still red flags with the province’s contact tracing phone app, experts say.

“Alberta Health is doing the right thing by having the privacy commissioner look at this app. They didn’t do it in a timely way, but I can understand and forgive them for that, given the nature of what we’re dealing with here,” said Ken Barker, a director of the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) at the University of Calgary.

“I also think (Alberta privacy commissioner Jill Clayton) did a good job diving into this, but they’re only looking at it from a regulatory perspective.”

Barker is part of a group of more than 100 cybersecurity academics who in May called for reviews for all Canadian contact tracing apps.

He said he appreciates that a third-party review was completed, but said a handful of points raised in the 66-page report are a cause for concern.

Among those problems, Barker said, is the widely publicized functionality woes the version of the app that runs on Apple devices encounters, where it is only able to operate when running in the foreground, meaning the device must be left on and unlocked at all times.

“If you ever lose the device, it’s now an unlocked device and all of your personal and private information is out there,” said Barker.

The issue is compounded by the app’s functionality cutting out if users exit the app to take a phone call or answer a text, for example.

Concerns with the IOS version of ABTraceTogether were echoed by Brenda Mcphail, director of the Privacy, Surveillance, and Technology Project with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“The underlying technology isn’t perfect and we should understand that when using these apps and thinking about whether or not they’re effective,” Mcphail said. “If the privacy invasion of using this app ... is to be proportionate to the benefit we get from it as individuals and as a society for the purposes of public health, it actually has to work.”

Alberta Health said Thursday that a fix to the functionality flaws on Apple devices is in the works.

However, a lesser-known problem with the app exists on Android devices, Barker said.

The Android app will run in the background, but users must turn on location services, despite the app saying it works only via Bluetooth.

“You’re enabling GPS and everything else, including Bluetooth,” said Barker. “The problem is that you’re now enabling the uploading of GPS data and all sorts of other data, which is explicitly not supposed to be a feature of the ABTraceTogether app.”

According to Alberta Health, more than 223,000 users have registered on the app since its early-may launch.