Contact Safe

Project Description

As COVID-19 began to spread throughout Australia, state governments began requiring commercial enterprises to assist contact tracing efforts by keeping a log of their patrons. Within 4 days of this requirement being announced, I'd partnered with one of our suppliers, OpusV to create a solution and my team at Lantern was calling businesses to sign them up.

There were two key problems we had identified early on:

1. Although the government was simplifying compliance by allowing venues to use simple paper and pen. This presented a number of issues. The first was around privacy. A bad actor could simple walk along a strip of shops at the end of the day photographing each registration sheet publicly displayed and capture a log of names and numbers useful for a variety of purposes. Further to this, because many patrons were concerned about sharing their information, many were putting in false details. Whilst this protected their privacy, it undermined the contract tracing system and increasing health risks. In fact "a poll of 1,500 Australians by News Corp found 1 in 10 Victorian respondents had provided incorrect or incomplete details on contact forms. Almost a quarter of Melburnians were concerned their details would not be destroyed, and about a fifth were concerned business would use the data for marketing."
2. For businesses wanting to use something more robust than paper and pen, the second problem was a number of marketing companies were pushing free solutions and promoting the ability to create large databases or customer lists that they could then on sell to marketing agencies. To know the mobile numbers of those attending specific geographic locations has a lot of value to marketers and many businesses began to fight for access to these details.

In both these approaches the patron was not put first, nor the public health needs of the country. Harnessing my knowledge of both public health, infectious diseases, business and technology, I worked closely with the team at OpusV to create a stronger solution.

Within 4 days we had a solution that could be scaled nationally complete with its own brand, website and onboarding funnel. The solution would verify users mobile number in a private and secure manner, it would also automatically delete their records after a defined period of time. Best of all, patron details went into a secure private database that couldn't be accessed by any venue giving no one the opportunity to leverage private data. Because all details were validated, this also enabled contact tracing to be more reliable. We also enabled the solution to be easily branded to suit different businesses and created communications paraphernalia that meant the system could run by itself without the need for venue staff to waste time administering it.

Whilst there was strong uptake for the solution it did not achieve the scale we hoped. This highlighted the power of incentives. Although our solution was technically 'better'. There were more incentives for businesses to pursue the marketing route and this is what we saw occur. Nonetheless I was proud of the initiative and both our speed and quality of execution.

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