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Developer of Malaysia’s COVID-19 contact tracing app apologises for wrongly giving some users quarantine status

Developer of Malaysia’s COVID-19 contact tracing app apologises for wrongly giving some users quarantine status

MySejahtera is Malaysia's COVID-19 contact tracing app. (File photo: Bernama)

KUALA LUMPUR: The developer of Malaysia’s COVID-19 contact tracing app MySejahtera has apologised for erroneously giving some users quarantine status.  

In a short statement issued on Sunday morning (Nov 7), the MySejahtera team said it has corrected the problem and that users' profiles who were wrongly accorded Person Under Surveillance (PUS) or Home Surveillance Order (HSO) status have been fixed.

“Good morning everyone - we apologise for the error on our part which allowed random users' to be given HSOs/PUS status,” MySejahtera wrote in a tweet.

“We have fixed the root cause which allowed this to happen. All incorrect HSOs have been deleted, and incorrect PUS status reverted,” it added.

The statement came after some netizens flagged on Twitter that their profile status on MySejahtera was suddenly tweaked to PUS or HSO, even though they were not aware that they had come into contact with a COVID-19 case.

A screenshot of a netizen's MySeahtera profile which changed to HSO. (Photo: Twitter/@lokkhee1999)

Twitter user @lokkhee1999 wrote that he saw that his MySejahtera profile had changed to HSO status at 2am on Sunday despite having no travel history or contact with a COVID-19 case over the past 14 days.

“For my (travel) history, I have not even (gone) out anywhere within 14 days, please check into this,” the user wrote.

A screenshot of a user's MySejahtera's profile which changed to PUS status on Nov 7, 2021. (Photo: Twitter/@Fathpie)

Other users also complained that their incorrect status barred them from boarding flights.

Twitter user @lily_hara wrote: “I was stopped from taking my flight this morning because my status suddenly changed to PUS.”

In reply to MySejahtera’s statement on Twitter, Public Health Malaysia wrote that users who still had the wrong status reflected could try logging off and re-logging in again, deleting the MySejahtera application and re-installing it again or clearing the cache under the settings tab in the app.

In October, some MySejahtera users received unsolicited one-time passwords (OTP) to verify their phone numbers for check-in registration.

The MySejahtera team said the requests were due to “malicious scripts” but maintained that there was no user data leak.

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Source: CNA/am

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