News & Reviews:   MySJ Trace

Last month, we reported on how MySejahtera check-ins dropped by more than 6.3 million amidst concerns over user data privacy. Well, the check-in rates actually went down further since then, as we saw the average for check-in rates on 9 April 2022 being the lowest in 9 months.

As reported by The Sun Daily, MySejahtera averaged about 16.9 million check-ins nationwide on 9 April compared to the 17 million average recorded on 1 July. Moreover, the average daily check-ins at registered premises dropped by 7.4 million (30.3 percent).

Recently, our country’s contact tracing app, MySejahtera has been embroiled in controversy over its ownership. This is after the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) questioned the takeover of the app my MySJ Bhd from KPISoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd, which developed the app without a contract with the Malaysian government.

Despite Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin reassuring Malaysians on Monday that the app is owned by the government and that users' personal data are safe, it seems that many are still sceptical. This can be seen by the 26% drop in daily MySejahtera check-ins on 28 March 2022.

The MySJ Trace function which was added to the MySejahtera app in December last year has proved to be successful in conducting contact tracing of Covid-19 positive cases in Malaysia. In fact, a total of 124643 Covid-19 close or casual contacts have been identified by the feature as of 15 February 2022.

Revealed by Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin in a Parliamentary written reply yesterday, the feature, which uses Bluetooth technology to detect close proximity is currently being used by 5971117 people in Malaysia. For reference, the MySejahtera app has over 24.5 million users in our country throughout all platforms, meaning that only around 25% of users have opted for MySJ Trace.

With the rising cases of COVID-19 nowadays, you or other people that you know may have been labelled as casual contact in your MySejahtera (MySJ) app. That will change today as our Minister of Health, Khairy Jamaluddin officially tweeted that the MySJ trace and check-ins will no longer show that.

Just yesterday, the MySejahtera app had a new update that allows people to trace a person nearby who is covid-infected. To make sure that everyone is safe, our Health Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin would like to advise everyone to turn on the Bluetooth at all times.

MySejahtera's new feature MySJ Trace is now live for all Android users! If you have no idea what is it, the feature utilizes Bluetooth to detect whether a person nearby is diagnosed with COVID-19. The system will then notify those who may have been in close contact with that person.