Australians still fear an app to trace the spread of coronavirus could be hacked by China or used to arrest them, despite government promises.
The program, to be launched next week, records close contact between people so if one catches the virus, the rest can be isolated and tested.
However, it needs 40 per cent of Australians to voluntarily download and use it to be effective - a figure that looks like it will be a struggle to achieve.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it could hold one of the keys to Australia's escape from the ongoing social lockdowns, but not everyone is convinced.
Thousands of Australians swear on social media that the government would have to 'pry their phone from their cold, dead hands' to install it on their devices.
Even former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce is adamant there are too many privacy concerns to download the app.
'I treasure the government knowing as little about me as possible,' he said on Sunday.
'Australia is doing an extraordinary job of flattening the curve by reason that we are overwhelmingly decent and logical people. We don't need an app to tell us that.'
Mr Joyce doubled down on Monday morning, telling any news program that would listen that a foreign power could hack the information and use it against us.
'A benevolent source you maybe don't have to worry about, but the people who hack in to mine data sets are manevolent,' he said on Sunrise.
'We know that the Chinese Government have been hacking into our computers. They can very quickly work out where I am and who I'm speaking to and that's more information about me than I want them to know.'
Mr Joyce cited studies by Imperial College London on credit card metadata that four random pieces of anonymised information were enough to identify 90 per cent of users.
Australians could soon have their mobile phones tracked to see if they have come into contact with coronavirus (pictured, a woman wears a face mask at Bondi Beach on April 3)
Barnaby Joyce is adamant there are too many privacy concerns to download the app, including that China could hack the information on it
Smartphone location data could identify 95 per cent of people with just four points, which jumped to 99.8 per cent in a country town.
'Governments make mistakes, their experts thought My Health Records were never going to be put out to the public, but they were, weren't they Kochie?' he said.
Mr Joyce said Australia had only been so successful at stamping out coronavirus because its people go on board with government restricitons.
However, he feared that goodwill could be damaged by 'excessive overstep', such as an app that tracked them.
'If you take the Australian people too far, and I have some rough idea about this because I'm a politician, they will push back,' he told 3AW radio.
Government Services Minister Stuart Robert pushed back hard against his Coalition colleague and insisted the information collected couldn't be used to track anyone.
'I think most Australians, like me, aren't too concerned where Barnaby is,' he said.
Mr Robert said the app would only record a person's name, age range, postcode, and phone number when they signed up.
When two app users were within 1.5m of each other for more than 15 minutes it would record the other person's name and phone number.
That contact would be encrypted and stored only on the user's phone unless one of them later tested positive to coronavirus.
'If I was confirmed positive, my data goes up to a central data store, only to state health officials, no-one else, and then they could rapidly call anyone I had been in close contact with,' Mr Robert told the ABC.
The minister also tried to assuage fears many Australians hold that the app could be used to catch them breaking lockdown.
Many others are not convinced that the information wouldn't be later used for other purposes once the coronavirus crisis is over.
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