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A comment on Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge. Parent comment

Re:Massachusetts health notifications app installed without ... by kn1ght on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:04AM (#27559005)
The whole protocol was designed very cleverly from the start to avoid all the privacy blocks that might inhibit people from using it [1], because the main drawback in this is that it's completely useless unless you have a critical mass of users that actually use it.

It is very difficult to explain to people that are not curious about the technology and all they hear is 'tracing = tracking = no privacy'.

I imagine this is why this app has been silently pushed, but in my mind just having it available and active on phones does not help you that much if the same users are also not aware and actively reporting their infections. So you will have a very small group that consciously install it and when they get infected they report; a lot larger group will get a notification that they have been close to an infected individual. I suppose they hope that by showing those notifications then people that subsequently get tested positive will be curious enough to find out how they should report in, etc. It's risky especially seeing this backlash about silent installations...

[1] https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/cu...

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Re:Massachusetts health notifications app installed without ... by Aerroon on Saturday June 19, 2021 @02:57PM (#27563292)
>It is very difficult to explain to people that are not curious about the technology and all they hear is 'tracing = tracking = no privacy'.

But this is literally true. This is an app pushed to people remotely without their consent or even knowledge. People cannot trust the claim that there is no privacy gotcha involved in this, especially when previous attempts seem to have opened the log of this information to all installed apps:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/27/google-promised-its...

You cannot trust them when they say that the app respects your privacy.

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Re:Massachusetts health notifications app installed without ... by dTal on Saturday June 19, 2021 @03:21PM (#27563554)
Is there something special about it being an app? Because the contact tracing framework that the app uses was already pushed to people remotely without their consent or knowledge - as well as the contents of every update ever to Google Services Framework. And in the big scheme of shady shit that Android does without the user's consent or knowledge, that's a pretty benign, privacy-respecting one.
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Re:Massachusetts health notifications app installed without ... by esyir on Sunday June 20, 2021 @11:26PM (#27576018)
That's fascinating, I wasn't aware that they actually did that to allow for semi private tracing.

That's going to be hell to explain though, as you've already mentioned.

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