ALICE BRENNAN: Hello, Alice Brennan here, welcome to Background Briefing.

We have the show that puts Australia's best investigations into your pod feed every single week. How does the saying go?

RAHM EMMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis go to waste.

ALICE BRENNAN: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste...

It sounds especially gharish in the crisis we're currently facing... all over the world, many of us are dealing with loss and chaos ... our entire ways of life turned completely upside down ...

But the truth is, some people look at tall of this ... and see dollar signs ... that it's fertile ground to make money

There are a lot of people out there right now either already winning from this pandemic, or calculating how to win from it in the future.

Some are legit -- I mean who hasn't subscribed to an extra streaming service or online fitness app in the last month?

But some are less legit -- the nefarious winners.

So this week on the show -- we wanted to find out exactly who these winners are Who is winning from this crisis and how?

To start off with we sent our reporter Geoff Thompson to find some scammers he begins our story... at a stakeout outside a Perth post office.

ADRIAN FRANCIS: Hi Geoff

GEOFF THOMPSON: yeah G'day Adrian can you hear me alright?

ADRIAN FRANCIS: (tap tap) Ah yeah. Just bear with me for a second while I just make sure I'm actually doing a job at the moment. A surveillance job at the moment, so I'm in the car. My apologies.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Ah Gotcha, that's alright. It is actually it's about some face masks.(Laughs)

Private investigator Adrian Francis is sitting in his car staking out a Perth Post Office - he's on the hunt for scammers

ADRIAN FRANCIS: Basically, it's a report that we've got through the website where somebody is allegedly misrepresenting the quality of some masks that have come in from overseas.

As you can imagine, there's a lot of masks from India, China. A lot of I suppose mainly Asian countries are, poorly manufacturing masks and then submitting them as N-95 masks.

So we're just having a quick look to see the supposed to be arriving at a post office box within the next couple of hours. So we're just gonna try and see who's picking them up.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Adrian's a former policeman from NSW but now he spends most of his time investigating counterfeit products.

He suspects the mask delivery he's staking out will be dodgy ones from overseas.

ADRIAN FRANCIS: They're bulk amounts, they're quite cheap. But obviously they're putting up the price by 3, 400 per cent. You know, we're hearing that some of these, whether it be hand sanitizer or masks, are being, manufactured and distributed by organised crime groups.

GEOFF THOMPSON: People have been leaving anonymous tip-offs on Adrian's website about Coronavirus scams like backyard brewed hand sanitiser that's labelled and sold as the real deal big company stuff. Along with masks health workers so desperately need.

ADRIAN FRANCIS: you've got to ask yourself. If there's such a short supply of them, why is there such a high supply of them on the Internet?

I shouldn't laugh about this, but we had a funny incident the other day where someone sent us a photograph of a mask they purchase, which they said that was quite thin. And they'd sneezed in the mask and it had blown the front of the mask out. So the mask was just hanging down.

GEOFF THOMPSON: In the end, no-one ever came to pick up the bulk face mask order at the Perth post office but Adrian has no shortage of other scam tips to chase down.

Coronavirus is keeping the scam-busters of the world busy too.

KITBOGA: Do you have any of that available - the the cure?

GEOFF THOMPSON: Coronavirus scams are going viral...

SELLER: Yes, sir. Actually, sir, this immunity blend. The main focus for this one is to protect against environmental threat uh...it's very effective to fight against coronavirus because of it contains 100 percent pure essential oils and it also supports healthy immune function

KITBOGA: Just to be sure, I want a cure. It's been tested and this works or,...

SELLER: Yes

KITBOGA: ok.

GEOFF THOMPSON: That old man's voice belongs to a young American who calls himself Kitboga.

KITBOGA: Most people just call me Kit and I have a livestream, a YouTube channel

GEOFF THOMPSON: The former software engineer now makes a living scamming the scammers.

He's been doing it for about three years ... it's part public service, but mostly Kit's on a mission to publicly shame the unsuspecting staffers manning the scammer's call centres.

KITBOGA: My goal is to raise awareness about what the scammers are doing, as well as provide some entertainment in the whole area of it. So I play different characters and I try to put the scammers through pretty ridiculous situations

GEOFF THOMPSON: In his videos he usually dresses up to mask his true identity - he sits in front of a green screen wearing wigs and big aviator sunglasses over which his trademark cynical eyebrow arches

KITBOGA: In my car I had these old aviator glasses and I just put them on. And I think that just became the thing.

GEOFF THOMPSON: ...and he alters his voice to lure the scammers in to taking his bait.

KITBOGA: I can pitch my voice higher. Do it like a call that's like a valley girl voice, which this is how you have to talk without it.

It's kind of weird, but if you pitch shift your voice a little bit higher then it sounds. You know, like I'm maybe a young girl.

Or this is like an older woman, maybe with a really, really bad cell phone connection.

So if I feel like I need to ... you know if I want to play like Russian Voice or something like that, I can make it sound like I have a really bad phone connection.

GEOFF THOMPSON: The pandemic has given Kit even more material to work with.

And he live streams everything to thousands of fans.

KITBOGA: there's thousands and thousands of domain names being registered related to the Coronavirus. And I've randomly pulled some of them up. And you can actually see that they're developing scams and different things around it.

GEOFF THOMPSON: As I watch Kitboga do his thing - it's alarming to me that there seems to be no end to what Coronavirus snake oil sellers are prepared to promise anything for a buck.

KITBOGA: Is it true that if you put it underneath your toenails, it absorbs into your bloodstream faster?

SELLER: Yes, you are correct.

KITBOGA: Good, good, good. Could you do me a favour? Can you list up the ingredients one more time? It was cinnamon...

SELLER:, cinnamon, glow, biid, lemon, lime, eucalyptus, rosemary, peppermint, spearmint and oregano, essential oils.

KITBOGA: You know, I think I gave all that in my kitchen right now. I'll probably just go up and kind of. I don't know, maybe I can blend it all up and make a soup out of it.

SELLER: Uhm upon checking. Thank you, sir. Your. We have a problem with your address because it's not found in the USPS.

KITBOGA: It doesn't exist. Just like your cure. You're lying son of a gun.

SELLER: Right. So I think. Oh, dear, no, we're good. Now, are you kidding me?

KITBOGA: It's not. Yes. I just want to show to people who are desperate. You're a liar and a thief. You should be locked up.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Back in Australia we've got our own breed of online scam hunters.

ALEX: It's 13 past 10 and I've just finished a teleconference with the rest of the scams team.

GEOFF THOMPSON: As Alex begins another busy day working remotely from his Canberra home ... he's trying to keep up with the surge in COVID19 scams targeting Aussies.

ALEX: So looking at these now, we've got a page for toilet paper sales with no delivery on a social media platform, with accompanying reviews, masks on delivery and masks non-delivery.

GEOFF THOMPSON: A law grad with a masters in IT, Alex is a senior member of the ACCC's ScamWatch team.

ALEX: There's four phone numbers from phishing attacks which we'll pass to telcos to have a look at. And the second Covid 19 psychic healing scam that we've seen

GEOFF THOMPSON: Alex clocked a big one on Tuesday morning this week at --

ALEX: ...10:40. We've just discovered 16 reports that all talk about receiving an SMS that says you were due to receive an ATO refund of one thousand seven hundred eighty six dollars and fifty one cents. Visit h._d._t._v Vasconcelos slash ATO dot gov dot au dot tax manager dot info forward slash claim and the site looks identical to my GOV. It is a really, really good phish. So I am deeply concerned. I'm going to stop this now and notify the Cyber Security Centre and see if we can't take down the site and get some warnings in place as quickly as we can.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Right now, the scams have stepped up.

Alex and the team are working around the clock to protect us from scammers capitalising on Coronavirus confusion

DELIA RICKARD: We have seen them going from a trickle in January, February to getting over 50 a day. So so far we've had six hundred eighty six reports, but the numbers are going up every day.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Alex's boss Delia Rickard is the deputy chair of the ACCC.

Since the start of the year, the ACCC had received more than 1100 reports of online scams relating to Coronavirus ... estimated to have cost Australian scam victims a total of nearly 150,000 dollars.

DELIA RICKARD: You've got people at home, they don't necessarily have the same IT protection on their home devices as the ones that work. Suddenly, people have never online shopped in their life or online shopping. People may be worried about others who are worse positions than themselves wanting to donate to them. And people are desperate for information. So when they see something that looks to them like it might help them find about how they can get tested or what's happening, and they click on links without thinking about it. So it is absolutely fertile ground for scammers, unfortunately.

ALICE BRENNAN: Federal authorities are continuing to investigate the ever-increasing number of scammers looking to make a quick buck out of corona fears.

But there's another type of scam investigator... who's looking to filter out swindlers on the stock market...and they're aiming to make a profit while they do it.

Another one of our reporters Mario Christodoulou takes up the story... in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

JOHN HEMPTON: We spend most of our time chasing fraudsters, our job on the short side is to find every such scumbag in financial markets in the world and short a tiny bit of every one of their companies.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: That's John Hempton. He's the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Bronte Capital, a Bondi-based investment fund.

And he describes his business model like this.

JOHN HEMPTON: We turn shit into gold. We find the shittiest companies in the world bid against them and when those bets pay off, we try to buy the best in the world.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: It's safe to say that right now... the financial world, like the real world, is suffering... a lot.

REPORTER: a record shattering 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week,

REPORTER: the Australian sharemarket plunging more than 7 per cent in early trade

REPORTER: the chancellor has announced a multi-billion pound support package to help businesses through the corona virus crisis.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: If you're an investor and you have enough money and enough experience -- now is a good time to make bank.

John, for example, is a short seller.

A short seller is someone who sells a stock on the open market expecting or betting that it's probably going to drop in value, at which stage they can buy it back at a lower price.

Sell high, buy low.... Make money off the difference.

But short selling is risky... John makes most of his money the traditional way - investing in companies that will increase in value and, hopefully, make lots of money.

But when he is in short-selling mode, he's not looking for companies that are going to increase in value - he's looking for companies he expects to fail. He calls them scumbag companies - fraudsters, shysters and people who cook the books.

JOHN HEMPTON: We have computers to track bad people and we have more than 200 shorts on at any time. Wherever they are, anywhere in the world, as long as they're in the stock market and they're involved in things that you can bet against.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Unsurprisingly, scumbag companies, to use John's words, tend to be overvalued. So he bets against them, hoping to make money when they collapse.

JOHN HEMPTON: when the market is falling hard like it's been falling lately, that diversified short book tends to fall even harder. And so we tend to make money on those shorts.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Short sellers are sometimes described as professional sceptics. And it's this instinct that drove John to interrogate the early nonchalant response to the virus.

Back in February - three weeks before Coronavirus was declared a pandemic - he started to read medical journals

JOHN HEMPTON: That's actually one of the most frustrating periods in my life, because I was reading this stuff and thinking, oh, my God, this could be horrible. And I was modelling out just how horrible. But at the same time, you know, you had Donald Trump, for instance, just flat out dismissing it as an issue in the United States. And Scott Morrison, if he said anything, was saying highly reassuring statements. Right up to and including he's quite late statement saying that was okay going to the Football. Now, just as all politicians didn't see what was going on in the medical journals, the market didn't see. It was very strange you had reputable scientists in reputable journals saying, look, there's a reasonable chance of complete utter global catastrophe here.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Among investors, there's a race to predict the course of the virus. Because if you can predict when the virus will peak, you can also predict when the market will start recovering. And if you know that..well...that's pretty valuable information.

But how do you do that? Well, I'd like to introduce you to this guy.

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: Christopher Joye, I'm chief investment officer and portfolio manager at Coolabah Capital

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Christopher Joye is a busy man.

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: Let's just get through it Mario, let's start right at the top.



MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: His job is to protect and increase other people's wealth - a lot of it. He says Coolabah Capital manages about 4 to 5 billion dollars...

Christopher takes me through a series of slides and pauses at one in particular - a graph, showing a bold red line moving up and down like a Swiss mountain range. But this graph isn't infection rates or mortality data, this graph shows traffic congestion.

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: We monitor traffic congestion in Chinese cities or pretty much all global cities.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: So what does traffic congestion have to do with a pandemic? Well, it's giving Christopher Joye an insight into how quickly China is recovering from the CoronaVirus.

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: So if we just switch the screen to Beijing traffic, our hypothesis is they're telecommuting a little bit more so it hasn't quite recovered the 2019 levels. It's a little bit below 2019 levels. Now, why is this important? Because we want to know when China's factories or so-called supply chains come back on line.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Every morning he wakes up and looks at information sources spread across three continents, trying to find that key data point which will give him an edge.

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: I woke up at about 3:30 a.m. I'm checking not just in the movement in the U.S. equity market, in the US bond market, but also now I'm looking at infection rates around the world, the evolution of those infection rates, are they starting to decelerate? I'm looking at fatality rates. I'm looking at traffic congestion. I'm looking at restaurant bookings. I'm looking at public transport usage. Everything and anything, electricity consumption. Different forms of satellite image that give us a sense of pollution levels around the world to see whether industrial centres are truly back online

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: He's trying to figure out when the virus will peak, and, after it peaks. What happens next...will markets return to normal?

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: We want to anticipate the future, we want to try and divine the financial market destiny and we want to understand the true nature of the virus as well as we possibly can.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: Christopher's trying to figure out whether Australia will bounce back from COVID 19 -- Will things ultimately return to some sort of new normal? What companies will disappear? Who will lose their jobs? What industries will be the first to come back online? And which will never return at all?

CHRISTOPHER JOYE: The key question, though, for investors is, is this a temporary shock or is this likely to be a permanent shock? Our view is it is going to be temporary. If what I'm saying is right. If it's a temporary shock, if financial markets have potentially reacted in an exaggerated fashion to this shock, then there is every possibility that financial markets will also eventually normalise and that we can pick up cheap assets right now and make money out of those assets.

ALICE BRENNAN: There are companies already showing signs of recovery.

... and some haven't just recovered ... they're growing.

Many of them are technology stocks: Apple, Netflix, Amazon - they're capitalising on the suddenly burgeoning stay-at-home economy.

There's one such company that's experienced spectacular growth - you may have heard of it -- though it was once a little known video-conferencing program.

ACTOR: Bringing your together your team on Zoom feels just like you're all in the same room



Zoom is now the most popular product on Apple's App Store.

And with that I'm handing over to my colleague -- fellow reporter Meghna Bali -- and as she discovered, it's hit the big time... in spite of a succession of PR disasters.

MEGHNA BALI: So while stay at home orders have declared workplace banter and casual corridor brainstorming a thing of the past... there's one form of communication that's certainly on the up at the moment...

The ole zoom conference...

ALICE BRENNAN: I think everyone's here now because Geoff just joined us. Hello, Geoff.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Hello.

MARIO CHRISTODOULOU: And like just about everyone else ... we've stumbled into this new way of working...

KAT GREGORY: Our wifi has been down for 24 hours.

GINA MCKEON: While Alice is setting up, we'll do a quick whip around about how everyone's doing and feeling with their stories before the script review

MEGHNA BALI: In the last two months Zoom's user numbers have ballooned in a way even their CEO couldn't have imagined. From 10 million to 200 million.

The great thing with Zoom, it's it's so easy to use. And you've got a hundred people that can go on at the same time. And, you know, that's why we're on it every day.

The company's share price has soared too... from 68 point 72 US dollars at the start of January ... to a record-high of almost 160 US dollars a share at the end of March.

Zoom is undoubtedly a big winner in the corona crisis ...

But this unexpected growth has exposed some serious issues with the app.

We should probably consider, you know, whether we should communicate over Zoom as well.

ALICE BRENNAN: how do you communicate with sources who don't want to talk over Zoom?

MEGHNA BALI: Well, I mean, if my contacts for this story are anything to go by, I mean, everyone has preferred stuff like WhatsApp.

PATRICK WARDLE: Hello

MEGHNA BALI: Hi, Patrick. How are you?

PATRICK WARDLE: Good. I just got back from surfing, so I'm stoked

MEGHNA BALI: Patrick Wardle lives by the beach in Hawaii... in between surf sessions, he works as the principal security researcher at a software company called Jamf, and he's a former NSA hacker.

He's worried about the world's new reliance on Zoom.

And, yeah ... we spoke via Whatsapp

PATRICK WARDLE: Zoom has been designed first and foremost to be incredibly user friendly and also Zoom's priority you know, kind of as a Start-Up. Silicon Valley Start-Up is to grow its user base so it can expand as a company and IPO and make a lot of money. And that's well and good. But the problem is that pretty much flies completely in the face of security. Security is not something that makes you money.

MEGHNA BALI: ...hackers have been taking advantage...

PATRICK WARDLE: So hackers are the spy agencies now in a way had an easier time because they can target these people at home. Anytime there is a disaster or a situation where there's kind of fear, a lot of unknowns, hackers and malware authors, unfortunately, really jump on that as an opportunity, because amongst all the chaos from their point of view, it's really an incredible opportunity to often exploit people.

MEGHNA BALI: So what kind of hacking are we talking about here? Well, the boom of Zoom has illuminated it's various security flaws.

And those flaws have made way for some hilarious hijacking -- or zoom-bombing -- as it's called.

HAMISH BLAKE: Zoom for one more!

MEGHNA BALI: Like Australian comedian Hamish Blake... who's been dropping in on virtual workspaces

STUDENT: Can anyone else see Hamish Blake?

HAMISH BLAKE: Hey guys how's it going?

STUDENT: Are you going to take over our lectures?

HAMISH BLAKE: Can't do the lectures sorry just zipping around, picking up tutes.

MEGHNA BALI: But as Patrick tells me, zoom bombing is just one of the app's serious issues...

PATRICK WARDLE: Last year we had an issue where a malicious Web site could actually remotely turn on a user's webcam if they had Zoom installed and kind of spy on them.

MEGHNA BALI: There have also been more sinister instances... where hackers infiltrate calls and often shout racist slurs and threats.

TEACHER: Who is saying that?

MEGHNA BALI: It's now also emerged that thousands of Zoom videos are available online for anyone to see... including sensitive therapy sessions...

WEBINAR: And together... we'll just begin by taking a deep cleansing breath .

MEGHNA BALI: ...business meetings and nudity from an online Brazillian waxing class.

These videos were uploaded by other Zoom users -- anyone was able to access them because recordings all have the same default file name... so it was easy to find them.

And last month The Intercept exposed that Zoom video calls were not end-to-end encrypted, despite the company's claims that they were.

Then Vice reported the company had accidentally leaked thousands of user's email addresses and photos.. because of an issue with how the app handles contacts.

And on TOP of that -- we now know that Zoom was also sending user data to Facebook -- info like when the user opened the app, their device model, the time zone and city they're connecting from and a unique advertiser identifier... which helps companies send targeted ads.

PATRICK WARDLE: Zoom said, hey, this was a mistake. We're sorry. And to their credit, fixed this. But the fact that that code was in this product that is being installed by millions of users around the world, again, kind of illustrates that, you know, Zoom's approach to security, and privacy is lacking.

MEGHNA BALI: Zoom C-E-O Eric Yuan publicly apologised for the myriad of flaws in a blog post on the site two weeks ago.

ACTOR: We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home. However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community's - and our own - privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry.

MEGHNA BALI: In the same post, Yuan outlined seven steps the company will take to protect its users... including diverting resources to tackle the safety issues.

Two days after that apology... The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab published a damning report about Zoom's security.

It found that Zoom was sometimes routing traffic, including videos and encryption keys, through servers in China... which means that technically the company was legally obligated to give those keys up if China requested them.

So up went another blog post from the Zoom CEO.

ACTOR: In our urgency to come to the aid of people around the world during this unprecedented pandemic, we added server capacity and deployed it quickly - starting in China, where the outbreak began. In that process, we failed to fully implement our usual geo-fencing best practices. We have since corrected this... We have also been working on improving our encryption and will be working with experts to ensure we are following best practices.

MEGHNA BALI: And then there was ... another announcement ...

This week, Eric Yuan posted that users will actually be able to opt in and out of the regions they want their data to go through ... but you can't opt out of the region you're based in, and the feature is only available to PAYING customers.

And the CEO noted that "data of free users outside of China will never be routed through China.

So given the risks, should we still be using Zoom...

The most sensitive Australian government agencies are thinking twice about it... I checked with all our Federal departments.

6 out of 14 told me that staff could use Zoom in exceptional circumstances... that's for unclassified meetings with external stakeholders and members of the public.

Here's what the other departments had to say:

Finance, Health and the Attorney General have blocked installation of the app on their networks...

Defence told BB they've issued general advice about safe use of tech -- but wouldn't confirm to us if they've banned Zoom.

Veterans Affairs wouldn't specify if staff used the app or not either.

The Department of Home Affairs told me it didn't rely on Zoom for internal communication.

The Department of Social Services said it didn't use it... and the Department of Foreign Affairs didn't respond to my questions.

Rachael Falk, CEO of The Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre says Australian agencies need to be more vigilant.

RACHAEL FALK: Anything that requires probably sensitive information they exchanged probably unwise for any government agency or public officials to be using it because it's not inherently secure.

MEGHNA BALI: She says in some way... Zoom has been a victim of its own success.

RACHAEL FALK: I kind of have some sympathy for the Zoom people because good on them. You know, they've got massive- their customer numbers must be through the roof. But at the same time,You really need to be accurate with your security advice and the information you give your customer base, because if you don't, they will leave you and they'll crucify you because you have to be really clear about what you will deliver and won't deliver.

MEGHNA BALI: The issues have led rivals to capitalise on Zoom's misfortunes... and spruik their own video-conferencing products.

Microsoft Teams clocked 44 million users in mid-March... jumping 12 million users in a week...

While daily usage of Google Meet is 25 times higher now than it was in January.

It's not hard to imagine that video conferencing software will become a more prominent technology in a post-corona world.

Social isolation means many of us are relying on technology in some way to work and socialise ... but potentially also fight the virus

And as my colleague Kat Gregory reports ... that fight may come at a cost to our privacy.

KAT GREGORY: Imagine for a second that just by using your mobile phone, you could track who has Covid 19? And you could figure out if you've been in contact with them?

Would you do it? I reckon your answer could be different to a few months ago.

After all this sort of technology - known as digital contact tracing - could save a lot of lives right?

That's a HUGE benefit to all of us.

PATRICK FAIR: I think the idea of using technology to contact trace is a bit of a no brainer, could save a great deal of time and economic impact if done properly.

KAT GREGORY: That's Patrick Fair - an IT lawyer and academic at Deakin University.

He and other IT privacy experts point out, there's big players that could make big wins. And it could come at the expense of our privacy.

Some tech companies are looking to make billions of dollars by creating and selling these contact tracing apps to governments desperate to stop the spread of the virus.

These companies also have the potential to make big money for years to come with all the data collected from us - which can be sold to advertisers for large sums.

And then there's the surveillance opportunities that this information offers to governments. All that data on our health, our movements and our interactions could be very tempting.

PATRICK FAIR: My concern is that we need to be careful to have in place the controls necessary to keep the information that's collected, particularly the information that's aggregated safe from being used for other purposes.

KAT GREGORY: At the moment in Australia, our method of contact tracing is manual. That means we rely on people with the virus to remember where they've been and who they've been in contact with.

But the Australian Government is launching a smartphone app to do this digitally...

It's based on the one being used in Singapore - called Trace Together.

Basically the app records if you've spent 15 minutes or more in close proximity with someone who has COVID-19.

ACTOR: Play your part in fighting Covid-19 with just two simple steps: One, download Trace Together, and two, turn on your bluetooth.

KAT GREGORY: The government is developing the app with help from the private sector...namely companies like Atlassian who've done some initial engineering.

At this stage it won't be mandatory -- meaning we opt INto it. But the government hopes at least 40 percent of us do.

Patrick Fair says, it needs to be done right, because if we don't, then our privacy and civil liberties are at risk.

PATRICK FAIR: it demonstrates the possibility of using information about what people are doing under close supervision and that that will be a temptation for government agencies who can see other applications and uses for that to deploy it for regulatory and enforcement purposes.

KAT GREGORY: At the moment Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and China have been able to do pretty effective contact tracing with apps. But it's raised a lot of questions about what happens with that personal data now and beyond this pandemic.

JOE ROGAN: There's a real concern about this stuff.. Just give up a little bit of your civil liberties, give up a little bit of your freedom, and we're gonna keep you safe.

KAT GREGORY: Particularly since these government agencies have been able to hone in on the data collected from people's phones.

That's worrying 20-year-old University student Milo Hsieh.

MILO HSIEH: they enforce it through, they track your phone to know where you are and call you every day.

KAT GREGORY: He returned home to Taiwan from studying in the US in mid March and he's been monitored by the government while in mandatory quarantine at his family home ever since.

MILO HSIEH: And yeah you're basically put under government surveillance for two weeks."

KAT GREGORY: If he goes out he could be fined thousands of dollars, thrown in jail or put in a quarantine facility.

MILO HSIEH: One concern I personally have is which part of the government has been processing my data. Whether they're still doing it. How do I know that I'm no longer being tracked? All sorts of these questions arise. What is going on in the background, after this 14 day period?

KAT GREGORY: And it's not an easy question to answer right now - how his information will be used in the future is really unclear.

China is a more extreme example. Tech companies tap into smartphone users' GPS or geo-location points and assign them a colour code of green for low risk, yellow or red for high risk.

It's based on where they've been and if they've been exposed to virus carriers.

That code then determines where that user can go.

This raises concerns about heavy government and police surveillance.

But very recently two of the world's biggest tech companies announced a system that they say could protect citizens' privacy as well as help stop the virus spread.

YOUTUBER: What timeline are we in? Answer. The confusing one, because Apple and Google have apparently joined forces...

KAT GREGORY: Soon both Google and Apple will send updates to users' smartphones that can support whatever sort of contact tracing app governments decide to use.

Although the system is based on bluetooth, not GPS, and would be encrypted.

PETER ECKERSLEY: But I think this kind of deployment by the technology companies is by far the fastest and most reliable way to do it.

KAT GREGORY: Peter Eckersley spent many years working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation - which advocates for digital privacy.

He favours Apple and Google taking the lead here

This move gives them some control over the tech and app developer market and a chance to be seen as good corporate citizens.

They just need to ensure government agencies can't cash in too.

PETER ECKERSLEY: And certainly there's, you know, some track record of various governments, including the Australian government, being voracious in terms of trying to gobble, gobble up data like this and then often just sitting on it and not really using it necessarily that that effectively to help anyone but creating a lot of privacy and civil liberties risks. Fortunately, that doesn't have to be the way we respond here.

KAT GREGORY: The tech giants say it'll be hard for governments, other tech or advertising companies and even themselves to access any personal data because it wont be stored in a central database.

It's not clear whether the Australian Government is intending to work in sync with the Apple and Google updates... And that has some privacy experts concerned.

Firstly, if the Australian Govt wholly adopts the TraceTogether model.. Some of the information we put into the app will be shared with the health department - like what's been happening in Singapore and that's a bit different to the tech companies' model.

RHYS FENWICK: if you're found to be infected, it's not a voluntary thing. The Ministry of Health will take your number and it will take the people you've been in contact with.

That gives the government a lot of crucial information about people, their movements and their health status. That information is power - which could last well beyond COVID-19.

I've been chatting with Rhys Fenwick. He's part of a global non-profit organisation called CovidWatch.org

RHYS FENWICK: Once we establish the norm that it's okay for the government to use that once people have gotten you started something normal. And once people see it as something that's helpful. It could then be applied in a bunch of situations that are less urgent than a global pandemic.

KAT GREGORY: Rhys' team has been developing a contact tracing app since January - one with privacy at its centre.

RHYS FENWICK: So we've moved away from our original GPS idea and instead for now, we're using Bluetooth to do contact tracing.

KAT GREGORY: Why have you moved away from GPS to Bluetooth.

RHYS FENWICK:A few reasons. Firstly, one of our biggest concerns is privacy. GPS data or your location data is very, very hard to anonymize.

KAT GREGORY: Basically bluetooth picks up signals from people's phones near you and those connections are stored in the phone as unique number codes.

RHYS FENWICK: Now, if next week I come down with a dry cough and I go to the doctor, it turns out that I have Coronavirus or COVID-19, I will look on my phone and I'll see all the random numbers from all the people I connected with and I will post them on the app.

KAT GREGORY: Then users who might have been in contact with him would be alerted.

The app's voluntary and relies on the user to enter their own data. That information is encrypted.

Singapore's TraceTogether model also uses bluetooth and isn't mandatory.

The difference is what happens to that data - with CovidWatch's app, it stays on the phone, so it's not shared with any government agencies.

But the Australian government is adamant our privacy will be protected. In a statement the Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert said:

ACTOR: The app is fully encrypted and cannot be accessed by anyone, including the user. The data of close contacts will only be shared with health authorities after an individual has tested positive for coronavirus and consents to it.

KAT GREGORY: In any case, it's easy to imagine that some big data companies will do well out of this pandemic.

RHYS FENWICK: obviously if anyone can create an app that can do this, it would be quite lucrative if they have the right connections.

KAT GREGORY: How lucrative could it be?

RHYS FENWICK: One one thing I can think I can give you is one contract that I saw. So this was not a hypothetical. This is a contract that I saw some of you replied with was asking for twenty five million dollars.

KAT GREGORY: Jeez

RHYS FENWICK: It's pretty lucrative. Now, that was on the side of the small active companies looking to make it rich.

KAT GREGORY: Already the Australian Government has paid out more than 3 million dollars just to one technology company called Delv to help with the Government's COVID-19 information apps launched in March.

It appears that at this stage Atlassian hasn't won any significant paid government contract for its engineering work on the contact tracing app.

But the potential is huge for big tech companies.

RHYS FENWICK: When we're looking at large, well-established corporations that are already tied into government and to an extent into things like the military and kind of military contractors they would be looking at, well, upwards of twenty five million dollars

KAT GREGORY: Government Services Minister Stuart Robert has since provided further details about the contact tracing app. He says if a user confirms they have been diagnosed with coronavirus, their data will be sent to a secure national health storage facility and then passed on to state governments and that data will not be stored or used for surveillance.

ALICE BRENNAN: That's it from us here at Background Briefing for this week.

If you like what you hear don't forget to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts in the apps. It helps us get our name out there and to keep on doing what we're doing.

Thank you to the entire team who contributed to the show this week.

Background Briefing's Sound Producers are Leila Shunnar and Ingrid Wagner.

Sound engineering by Simon Branthwaite

Our supervising producers are Gina McKeon and Ben Sveen

And the reporters are Katherine Gregory, Meghna Bali, Mario Christodoulou and Geoff Thompson.

I am the executive producer of the show and my name is Alice Brennan. Thank you so much for listening and we will catch you next week.