Agreed TFA is misleading. Apple and Google refused to allow governments to track individuals through exposure notification apps and forced client-side, privacy-preserving notifications. I’d imagine HN would have supported the Apple/Google approach where everything’s local and anonymous rather than what many governments initially proposed where identity and/or location was logged by the apps. (I also agree that privacy-preserving exposure notifications are better than invasive tracking ones, especially in the US where the citizenry expects a right to privacy)

Source: ran the team that developed one of the first US state exposure notification apps based on EN Express, the protocol to which the linked source is referring.

>"Early in the pandemic, for example, Apple and Google refused to adapt their operating systems to host contact tracing apps developed by public health authorities and supported by elected officials."

I am one of the last people to defend Google and/or Apple, but in this case they just didn't weaken their existing guidelines for states to snoop the data of their citizens. A hypothetical contact tracing app that would have met the guidelines would have had no problems at all.

That is a rich comment coming from Google when Page was boasting google can predict how you are going to vote before you will know it.