By Norrasyidah Arshad
SHAH ALAM, May 8 — The SELangkah initiative that was introduced by the Selangor government for Covid-19 contact tracing is a safe and effective system to be used by the public.
Selangor Task Force for Covid-19 member Dr Helmi Zakariah said the initiative will not breach data privacy of the users as it would only record the time and location of visitations at a particular premise.
“When we download a phone app, the biggest concern the public has is the question of data privacy and the tracking of their movement. But with this system, we make the premises as the ‘control centre’.
“So when a person visits a particular premise, we only track the person’s visitation history at that particular premise and others who have visited at the same time so that this would help in contact tracing,” he said in a video presentation shared on amirudinshari.com.
Dr Helmi said SELangkah was formed after the state government realised that there are limitations to the current contact tracing mechanisms, which mostly require manually log in.
He said the first phase of the system will start at the wet markets and grocery shops, which are one of the main economic sectors that are at risk as a place where the virus is easily spread.
The online contact tracing initiative was introduced on May 5.
Each individual premise is required to produce its own QR code through the selangkah.mbiselangor.com.my website or selangkah.my, and have it displayed for the visitors to scan the code.
On Wednesday, Amirudin had said that the SELangkah initiative would be adopted at all administrative, private and business premises in Selangor effective immediately.
