Australia’s intelligence agencies have been caught “incidentally” collecting data from the country’s COVIDSafe contact tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. The report, published Monday by the Australian government’s inspector general for the intelligence community, which oversees the government’s spy and eavesdropping agencies, said the app data was scooped up “in the course of the lawful collection of other data.” But the watchdog said that there was “no evidence” that any agency “decrypted, accessed or used any COVID app data.” Incidental collection is a common term used by spies to describe the data that was not deliberately targeted but collected as part of a wider collection effort.

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