I had this set up the day it was available in my area. Never got an alert. I find it difficult to believe I wasn’t “exposed” during the pandemic, so I assume this didn’t really provide much value.
In Canada my girlfriend was exposed. She called the testing places to tell them, and to book a test. They told her no, and to go away.
When I realized the already small percentage of people that are trying to use this system were being denied, I disabled it. It’s actually useless.
I guess it depended on how many others did it. I’ve gotten a few of them here in the Netherlands, though in my case they never provided info that I didn’t already have. Nevertheless I did see the value of it, in some cases it could be very useful
I’m originally from Brazil but I’ve been living in Poland for the past decade so I had the Polish app setup with Android covid notifications. The neat thing is that it doesn’t matter as they all talk together due to how the protocol works.
I got a few notifications in Poland, and I also did travel to Brazil, and got notifications there too.
The app only works if enough people are in though, so if nobody uses then it won’t work. Depends on the area, people, way of thinking.
I had quite a few notifications from it in the UK during the height of the pandemic, though that might be more of an indication of how much our government fucked it up
Yeah I was in NYC, rode the subways a lot, and never got a notification…
The gov version worked fine here in Australia, but not whatever that is, far as I know.
Not sure where you’re located, but I had a couple notifications reach while in Germany. Also on iOS, if that matters…
I was fine with masks and vaccinations but this kinda felt like being tracked so I didn’t go for this one
You’re most likely being tracked. But not by this. The various bluetooth covid tracking systems were surprisingly good in terms of privacy.
In that case there should have been more focus on this in the psa’s
I got one to hit me 14 days after I was exposed. I had to self isolate for a full ten minutes.
I went to somewhat busy places later in the pandemic after the first vaccines were out. Nothing.
Nothing from the Colorado exposure app either. (It was probably tied to Google anyway.)
I’ve never gotten an alert and I know I’ve had “exposures” in the past from work emails. Guess it’s time to uninstall…
It was a nice idea.
Google has a hard-on when shoving something in its graveyard.
They really did genuinely work with Apple to create a system that could track contact while also not making it really possible to track individuals.
Too bad for the three persons that used it, including the Google QA team
I don’t think I even had it, no idea.
It’s finally gone
Why do you have two battery indicators
I have one
What is that bar on top of the screen then?
Oh yeah, you are right
I didn’t even know this existed. Like most things google shuts down.
Good riddance. It’s a totalitarian privacy nightmare that never functioned as advertised.
Similar systems were widely deployed in Singapore, on the premise it would only be used to fight COVID. Then to no one’s surprise, law enforcement started it using for criminal investigations.
Once they’re built, governments cannot resist abusing such systems.
You probably have no idea how it, nor that system from Singapore work, right?
The Google system allegedly shares hashes of a ID-number salted with a rotating timestamp over BLE. But it’s also a closed-source binary. Can you or anyone else actually inspect its implementation? Can you really guarantee it doesn’t have even the smallest design flaws?
This technology is exceptionally dangerous. There is very little difference between these two scenarios:
- A doctor has identified a COVID patient. Let’s notify everyone who’s spent time with them recently.
- Secret police have identified a “dissident”. Let’s round up all their close associates.
It’s voluntary (for now). It’s allegedly secure (for now). But did anyone actually benefit from this complicated system? All I see are downsides.
Security researches have taken apart the binaries, listened to network requests and everything else you need to do to verify that nothing nefarious was going on. The system itself is set up so no tracing is possible if nobody reads your hashes.
[Citation needed]
Every reverse-engineering study I’ve read has been about the apps built in top of the Google API, not the Google binaries. Here’s one, and here’s another, and neither paints a flattering picture.
Maybe it’s possible to build a perfect implementation, but that is not what we got.
You know what does work? Masks and vaccines. Phone-based tracking was a dangerous waste of time.
Maybe it’s possible to build a perfect implementation, but that is not what we got.
What exactly are you referring to? The whole approach is built in a way that doesn’t really give anyone any way to screw things up. Please be specific.
You know what does work? Masks and vaccines. Phone-based tracking was a dangerous waste of time.
Unless you were testing yourself literally every day, phone-based tracking is a great way to tell you when you should test yourself. It’s a great addition to other preventative measures, and I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion while thinking rationally about this topic.
