Android is removing COVID-19 exposure notification settings
Android is removing COVID-19 exposure notification settings
Google is removing the exposure notification settings for COVID-19 that have been on Android since the 2020 pandemic.
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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.
You get downvoted by people who have no experience of this. Young guys growing up on social media. But you are right. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.