covid-alert-app VS nzcovidtracer-app

Which app are you talking about? If you're referring to the national COVID Alert app, it was open source. If you're referring to the system APIs that were provided by iOS and Play Services, then of course they were not open source, but they did have very, very thorough white papers, and they were not developed by the government.

Reddit is literally filled with developers and this is the most tech illiterate thread I’ve come across. The app is a public repo

It's open source, here's the hit repository: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app

If you're curious, the source code is here: App: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app Server: https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-server

The basic setup is pretty solid for privacy. You can, if you're really paranoid, build the app from scratch because the source is right here. Doing it that way will get around any concerns they backdoor the prebuilt app with something nefarious.

It was developed by CDS. It’s open source too.

The apps themselves in Canada at least are open source (server) and have been peer reviewed by third parties and anybody in the community who was interested, a few things were fixed that way. I can not comment on other countries.

Also, the app which is open source, stores its data on your phone and under your control: https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app/privacy-and-security-nz-covid-tracer

The code for this easter egg can be found here on GitHub.

It won't be hard to build something that looks like the official one, since the source code is public. It might be a violation of the copyright on the sourcecode that he can be pinched down on. They put it under the GNU, and the way I read that licence it says you can use it to do whatever you want.

Really interesting write-up! New Zealand COVID Tracer app QR codes are actually pretty similar. We don't use URLs, but we do use a base64 encoded JSON prefixed with the "NZCOVIDTRACER" string.

NZ Covid Tracer App is actually open source and the QR code reading function can be seen here: https://github.com/minhealthnz/nzcovidtracer-app/blob/main/s...

And here's the type for the JSON we use: https://github.com/minhealthnz/nzcovidtracer-app/blob/main/s...

Here’s the thing - it does do it. Here’s the code.

It does transmit metrics like the number of scans you've made, but nothing identifiable. This is verifiable by reviewing the source code.