
Australian Government Contact Tracing Leadership Failures: COVIDSafe - ghuntley
https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1256935025095741441
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ghuntley
It's a big thread scroll to the bottom and then scroll backwards. I promise
you it is worth it.

Other countries can learn a lot about what not to do with contact tracing by
following along.

I'm publically putting more pressure on highlighting failures of leadership
and that the community wants to work with the government and are offering
suggestions.

a) have customer support on app stores reply to people who are having issues

b) acknowledge bug and privacy reports / engage with the community and release
the source code so we can be more effective in helping.

c) start a bug bounty (unpaid suffices tbh) program

d) amount of downloads is clearly a vanity metric. leadership of the country
is sprouting amount of downloads as success to reopening the country but the
appstores comments are littered with failure. members of the public are
catching on to it and leaving comments as such on app store reviews

e) having absolutely no customer support on social media is a bad idea

f) and finally, seriously how many days does it take to change a UI label and
ship it?

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.9news.com.au/article/e91465...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.9news.com.au/article/e9146501-6bbd-4509-b89a-406b2b98ed2a)

The bad UX was reported on launch day and still has not been resolved or
acknowledged. It is and has caused public panic.

~~~
jka
Thanks Geoffrey - I'm based in the UK, and have been following developments
around CovidSafe fairly closely, since it seems like we may be in a similar
boat here soon.

All of your advice is sensible, and I expect that if & when those suggestions
begin echoing in politician's ears then gradually the message will get
through.

It'll no doubt be important for entrepreneurs and business leaders with
experience of the app ecosystem to share similar feedback, especially to reach
any politicans who share a closer language and culture with them than with us
detail-level engineers.

Keep up the good work and don't burn yourself out over it - staying fresh and
clear-minded will be important to keep track of changes and respond to
questions throughout. Take some good rest when there's a safe opportunity.

Partly for other HN readers/contributors here - your panel discussion[1] the
other day was very informative as well. Cheers!

[1] - [https://www.troyhunt.com/covidsafe-app-teardown-panel-
discus...](https://www.troyhunt.com/covidsafe-app-teardown-panel-discussion/)

