Health Ministry renews call to download Aman app

AMMAN — Amid a rise of the number of local coronavirus cases over the past week, Minister of Health Saad Jaber has urged the public to download the Aman application.

Aman, an application developed for Jordan's Ministry of Health by the COVID-19 JOTECH COMMUNITY, alerts its users if they have been in the vicinity of a diagnosed coronavirus patient.

With the hike of virus cases number, the Ministry of Health renewed its call on citizens to download the app which was launched in May.

The Health Minister recently said in a press conference that downloading the app is a “moral and ethical obligation towards one’s self, family and country”.

A statement by the Ministry of Health made available to The Jordan Times on Monday said that the Aman app has “an effective role in breaking the chain of infections and thus limiting the spread of the virus”.

A number of citizens contacted the ministry to ask for instructions as they suspect having contacted or been infected by the virus after receiving alerts from the app over the past week, the ministry said.

These alerts revealed 10 new cases of infection, five of which were confirmed on Sunday.

“The app employs modern technology and data science to support epidemiological investigation efforts, confine the disease and detect virus hotspots,” said the ministry in the statement.

It added: “The importance of downloading Aman lies in its ability to quickly alert those in contact with COVID-19 patients during the past two weeks to test themselves, thus breaking the chain of infection, and reducing the number of infections while preserving the privacy of its users.”

However, since the app asks for access to the users’ location information for the past two weeks in addition to their current location, some citizens have voiced their concerns over privacy issues.

“If the Aman app [‘Safety’ in Arabic] is so safe, how come it asks for our Google account information?” said Ghalib Rababah, an English professor at the University of Jordan.

Another citizen, Abla Rawashdeh, said that she “did not feel comfortable disclosing that kind of information to a governmental entity”.

However, the Health Ministry as well as tech experts repeatedly assured citizens that their data "cannot be accessed or identified even by the app creators themselves".

“The location is vital to the function of the app, as it cannot work without having identified a COVID-19 persons' location or those around him. It is not a trick to access data, especially that even the ministry does not know who these alerts are being sent to. If they did, they would simply know who to quarantine,” said Mohammad Sakfi, a tech expert, on Facebook.

The creators of Aman app told The Jordan Times upon launching the app that “the application does not ask you for any personally identifiable information” and that “the privacy of a user’s data is the app’s number one priority”.

So far, more than 500,000 users have downloaded the Aman app.