Monday, 2024 December 23

Daily Digest | The COVID payment app

Hey there. It’s Brady, rounding out the week for you.

By now, most countries and territories have their own COVID-19 tracing apps. They’re part of our lives, and will live in our phones for the foreseeable future.

Over in Indonesia, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, the deputy chairman of the COVID-19 mitigation and national economic recovery team, wants to turn the country’s test and tracing app, PeduliLindungi, into a payments portal.

There certainly was some asymmetrical thinking behind this proposition: since so many people use the app, then perhaps it could be a way to broaden financial inclusion.

But many people who use PeduliLindungi aren’t happy about the proposal. It’s buggy, and the Indonesian internet governance forum has listed 15 things that the app’s developers need to fix. The issues aren’t just related to functionality; they also impact user privacy and data protection.

In other words, this isn’t a solid foundation to build a fintech app on top of.

There’s more to the story. Khamila wrote about it. You can check it out here.

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