StaySafe.ph App: public health tool or creeping surveillance app?
Jose Eric M Lacsa · Journal of Public Health · 2021
To the editor In a recent correspondence published in this journal, the author advocated for a data-driven culture towards public health, particularly in the Philippines.1 I deeply agree with the suggestion proposed by the author, but there are instances where fatal privacy issues are a primal consideration especially when the security of people is at stake. The Philippines, for example, through the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for the management of emerging infections diseases, has mandated the national government agencies and local government units to use StaySafe.ph app which is the government’s preferred contact-tracing application.2 This was one concrete solution thought by the government— as lawmakers urged IATF—to establish a single nationwide contact-tracing system to improve the monitoring of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases even after a year the first COVID-19 case was reported.3 With the plan to automate contact-tracing application, even the Philippine presidential spokesperson Harry Roque admitted that contact tracing has been the weakest point in the government’s pandemic response—mainly because some local governments still manually encode data.4 It is important to take note that case investigation and contact tracing is a key strategy for preventing the further spread of COVID-19.5 If the government acted out too late in responding and preventing this problem, there is a need to find a way through a collaborative effort across public and private agencies to solve this predicament. In addition, information technology (IT) experts, including former Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) official Eliseo Rio Jr, worry about the data privacy features of an app being used by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and endorsed by security officials for contact tracing.6