The federal government's COVID-19 contact tracing app is facing criticism for its download requirements, which restrict some Canadians from accessing and using the app.
The free "COVID Alert" app, which became available on Friday, is designed to track the location of phones relative to each other, without collecting personal data anywhere centrally.
Christopher Parsons, a senior research associate at Citizen Lab, part of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Policy, says that makes the app inaccessible for older Canadians and other marginalized groups. "On the technical end, the developers deserve to be congratulated," he said. "This is a failure of policy. The government should have seen this, I hope someone has, they should have predicted it, I hope someone has, and they should have done something to try and start fixing it."For a contact tracing app to properly work, he said, it requires 65 to 80 per cent of all Canadians to use it. The current version of the app makes that impossible.
Stiles' parents, both in their 70s, tried to download the app on their older iPhones, but it didn't work.
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