Despite the spy allegations, Myzetora receives 30,000 downloads daily

About 24.5 million users are currently downloading more and more MyStera apps daily, despite false allegations that the government is using the app to spy on the public, a Health Ministry (MoH) official said.

The unnamed official now has 20,000 to 30,000 daily downloads, while the app records an average of 17 million check-in per day.

“We can say that 70 per cent of the population of Malaysia have downloaded the app and are using the app to test locations,” he said.

One recent viral video claiming that the app has permissions, the government uses to spy on the public, he said, could lead to the removal of the app by a few thousand users.

He added that such unsubstantiated claims not only caused unnecessary panic among users, but also led to difficulties in finding contacts.

“Those with Myzetera application, if they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for Covit-19, will be notified in use immediately to go for fabric tests,” he said.

However, those who do not have the application will only be notified via SMS or phone calls, and this can take up to three days longer as the MoH team will have to go down to the domain to locate these individuals through manual logs.

MyStera is used to compile data for easy and quick contact tracking so that if there is a positive case, the list of places where the patient has been in the last 14 days can be extracted immediately, he said.

“If you ask anyone, can they remember every place they have been in the last 14 days? So without use, it would be a very difficult process to find out where the patient was and who he was in contact with, because our officers should interview the patient and try to remember them, ”he said.

Data will be ready immediately in the MySejahtera application, and MoH officials will only conduct a brief interview with the patient, measuring the duration and risk factors of each location they were in.

In one cluster, for example, it found more than 20,000 contacts to find data from the application.

“We have confirmed that number with field data and 400 close contacts should be tested,” he said.

He said communication tracking was not as easy as testing everyone who was in the same place and time as the patient.

“We take into account other risk factors such as whether the patient was wearing a mask, whether he was in contact with anyone, whether he trained the SOP to be one meter away from others, whether he used hand sanitizer or how long he was in one place.”

For example, someone who spends less than five minutes on a campus while pursuing SOPs has a lower risk factor than those who dine at a restaurant and stay there for more than an hour.

Therefore, if a Govt-19 patient arrives at a gas station less than five minutes later and sticks with SOPs, those who visit the gas station after him are at lower risk.

“This is why we can never identify any place as an ‘affected’ area because there is no way to define an area as an affected area,” he said.

He explained that even if a worker is positively tested in one place, that does not mean that the place is a “affected” area.

“There was a case where a worker in a store tested positive, but there were no other cases from that store or other cases linked to the store, so it is wrong to say that the store is a‘ affected ’area,” he said.

Apart from this, information related to a patient is confidential, so the ministry cannot release anything about the patient specifically about their workplaces and home address, he said.

On the one hand it was paradoxical that people were concerned about the misuse of their personal data by the government, but on the other hand they demanded that the government release personal details related to Covit-19 patients specifically about their workplace or home. .

He said that thousands of MoH officers are on the ground daily to conduct communication tracking and this is a difficult task as the domain data has to be verified with digital data from MySGetera.

However, he said only a few authorities could access the source data extracted from MyStera to protect users’ privacy.

“Only three people can extract the source data from the application, and only five people are in charge of the MyStera data because we do not want more people to handle this data,” he said.

This means that not everyone has access to the data in MyStera, and the data will only be released once a positive case has been confirmed, he said.

Myzetora is said to be the best application to communicate that even Singapore follows.

“This is part of our epidemiological response system, which recently won us an award,” he said, referring to the runner-up award for countries-regions Govt-19 technology solutions at the 2020 Viza Global ICT Excellence Awards.

Director General of Health Don Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah last month was forced to reassure the public that the use of myocardial infarction will not be used to monitor those fleeing an area under the Motion Control Order (MCO).

Moh said Malaysians need not fear their personal details in the MyStera app used to register visits to their stores, as they are wholly owned by the Malaysian Ministry of Health and overseen by the National Cyber ​​Security Agency and the National Security Council. – Malay Mail

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