Najib said that the application had access to the personal data of almost all Malaysians.

“Therefore, a technology audit by an experienced private company appointed by the government together with members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) should be conducted to ensure that the user data compiled under MySejahtera is never leaked to third parties, as promised by the government,” he said in a Facebook post today.

Watch the video here.

Najib also suggested that certain components of the application be removed such as the scanning system as contact tracing would no longer be relevant once Malaysia begins the transition to the endemic phase of Covid-19 from April 1.

“In my opinion, the MySJ Trace component that uses Bluetooth technology to identify close contacts of Covid-19 patients is sufficient,” he added.

Early this week, health minister Khairy Jamaluddin sought to give assurances that the custodian of the data has always been the government, adding that maintenance of the platform was the only issue following reports of the app having been taken over by a private company.

Khairy said the government had not sold the MySejahtera app to any private firm and that the app still belonged to Putrajaya, with the health ministry appointed as the “main owner” of MySejahtera for the management of the nation’s public health.

He added that all MySejahtera data was handled by the ministry and assured users that their information would not be shared with other government agencies nor the private sector.

This comes after the PAC questioned the takeover of the MySejahtera app by MySJ Sdn Bhd from KPISoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd, the local company that developed it, but which is a subsidiary of a Singapore-based firm, Entomo Pte Ltd.