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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 225 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 16 June 2021 by Ms M.J. Davies

Parliament: 41 Session: 1

SAFEWA APP — ACCESS — POLICE INVESTIGATION

225. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Premier:

I have a supplementary question. I thank the Premier. I heard in there that, to the Premier's knowledge, there has been no commercial sale of private information captured by the SafeWA app. The question I asked in the second part was: how many SafeWA user details have been accessed by WA Police? That is, not the number of times that the police sought to access the information, but is it known what group of data has been provided to the police?

Mr M. McGOWAN replied:

The information is encrypted; it is not used for commercial purposes at all. As I said today, I am aware of some businesses that operate their own apps, if you like. I know the ABC has its own. Whenever I try to go and use ours at the ABC, I cannot use it. It has its own. I do not know whether it is collecting information. I do not know whether Woolworths has its own or whether it is collecting information, but certainly our app does not permit that to occur for commercial purposes.

I turn to the two crimes. As I said, one was an infamous murder. I do not know how many people's information was accessed, except to say that it would have been the people present on the night the murder took place. Police were trying to work out who might have been a witness and who might have seen something. With the other crime, I understand it was a very limited or very small number of people. I think people know what I am referring to. I do not want to talk about individual cases and circumstances, but I think people know the events that I am referring to. I understand why a detective might have wanted to access that information because it might have been crucial to solving a murder. I think a large proportion of the population would think that is entirely reasonable, because solving a murder is actually important! But in order to maintain the integrity of the system, we are legislating to put it beyond doubt that information cannot be obtained by police or anyone else for any of these sorts of purposes so people are absolutely confident it can only be accessed for health purposes.