LeaveHomeSafe app to drop built-in facial detection feature

A government official said on Wednesday that an update will be available for its LeaveHomeSafe Covid app soon to remove a facial detection feature built into its source code.

The move came after news agency FactWire revealed that the app has a built-in facial recognition function, and was later confirmed by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer.

The function could detect the positions of a person’s mouth, nose tip, left and right cheeks, eyes and ears. It can also detect the person's head tilt in degrees and calculate the probability that they are smiling or has each eye open, according to the news agency.

Speaking on a radio program this morning, deputy government chief information officer Tony Wong Chi-kwong said the feature had not been requested by authorities and it has not been activated for use since its launch.

He said the contractor responsible for developing the app has told his office that the function was bundled with a readily available module they adopted for the app.

"We have asked the contractor to check the codes in the module thoroughly to find out and remove functions that are not needed," he said, adding the update will be available soon to allay public concerns.

Meanwhile, Wong said his office has recently received reports about the app not being able to display QR codes of users’ vaccination records properly, and pledged to get the problem solved within this week by introducing a new update.