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Android is removing COVID-19 exposure notification settings
(9to5google.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Android
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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.
I ended up getting a few alerts, and each time I tested negative. Then later during Omicron, I ended up getting Covid and was contacted by a contact tracer for the city. I explained to them if they give me the code for the app, I can signal that I have Covid, and they said it wasn't worth it.
Overall I think it was an interesting idea, and the approach was pretty clever while also maintaining privacy. Really the failure was from the municipalities being out of the loop. I'm not sure if there were studies done, but I do wonder how accurate the exposure determination was, since for me it was always false positives.
How are you determining you got a false positive? The app alerts you if you were exposed to someone with COVID while out and about in your day. Just because you didn't catch COVID from your exposure does not mean the app gave you a false positive. Just that you weren't close to them long enough and/or your immune system, hygiene, or luck fought it off.
Only way you could really say you got a "false positive" was if you got an alert, for a certain day but knew that you had 0 interaction with people (you never left the house and no one came over during your alert).
I think there probably can be adjustments made with more research, which at the time was unrealistic, since we were in the middle of it. For the alerts to be meaningful, they should be actionable, and receiving an alert should tell the person they should take a test. If 9 times out of 10 the alert turns up a negative covid test, then it's not really reliable, and people won't see use in taking them seriously (aka Alarm Fatigue). Fine tuning the parameters of the alert can improve this rate, for example requiring longer durations in close proximity and/or closer distance between devices.
Of course dialing things too extreme would lead to "false negatives" which would be even harder to test for and validate, because of the nature of the recorded history on the device. Ideally there'd be 0 false negatives and 0 false positives, where every alert resulted in a positive covid test, and no positive covid test wasn't prompted by an alert. This is obviously unrealistic, but finding a good balance would make the alerts reliable, and useful. Since this system is going away, it doesn't really matter, but the principals of alerting are still important to consider in any system, especially where health & safety are involved.
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.....
Not sure where you’re located, but I had a couple notifications reach while in Germany. Also on iOS, if that matters…
The gov version worked fine here in Australia, but not whatever that is, far as I know.
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 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...
I got one to hit me 14 days after I was exposed. I had to self isolate for a full ten minutes.