THE proposed national bushfire warning system would enable authorities to track anyone’s movement in a declared disaster area by their mobile phone, opening up broad uses for the technology and raising privacy concerns.
Tender documents for the warning system to be built at the behest of all Australian governments reveal it could be used during disease epidemics, sieges, cyclones, terrorist attacks, locust plagues and heat or smog alerts.
The scope of the system has led civil liberties groups to warn of a need for tight privacy guidelines to prevent release or misuse of data on people’s movements.
The proposed model will deliver real-time, location-based warnings. It will follow the imminent first stage of the system that will deliver warnings to landlines and mobiles based on people’s billing addresses. In addition to warning people, the technology could help locate survivors in the aftermath of a fire. And it has the potential to identify looting suspects or suspected arsonists who continue lighting blazes once a bushfire has begun.
The Victorian government, which is running the tender on behalf of the Council of Australian Governments, this month called for expressions of interest in developing the system.
“The technology will have the ability to receive notifications about any new mobile devices entering a previously specified emergency area to alert the user that, for example, an emergency services vehicle has arrived at a location, or that a civilian has entered the area and may be unaware of the emergency,” the tender specification document says. “The technology will include the ability to receive notifications for any mobile devices exiting the defined emergency area. This could facilitate the creation of an evacuation list of people who are still remaining in the emergency area.”
The tender documents make it clear the system must be able to project the location of phones onto a map for the emergency services to use, while protecting their users’ privacy.
Prospective bidders are told in the document that the system must be able to send at least 100,000 messages for disasters that cover a wide area or densely populated centres of large cities.
Among the other events listed in the tender as prospective triggers for such warnings are chemical spills, cyclones, floods, hail, storms, tsunamis, winds, bombings and human and animal disease epidemics. The system would even be used for events in small areas such a high-rise building fires or armed robberies, according to the documents.
Michael Pearce SC, the president of civil liberties group Liberty Victoria, said the system had great potential to save lives, but strong regulations were needed to prevent the data being misused.
“Obviously there are privacy implications. You would want to be satisfied there are broad privacy protocols,” he said.
“This technology will have important uses, but there just has to be protection to prevent the misuse of the information.”
Telstra and Optus, which control 98 per cent of fixed-line infrastructure, were invited to bid for the initial billing address-based warning system, which is expected to be in place for the coming bushfire season for all states except Western Australia, which is sticking with its State-Alert system.
The federal Attorney-General’s Department said nationwide data would be stored in a secure federally run facility.
