CoronaNotify – Get Notified When the Coronavirus Is Near | Hacker News Reader

CoronaNotify – Get Notified When the Coronavirus Is Near

coronanotify.com

I like giving these "services" a one off email address from my own catchall and then check in on it months later to see how they attempted to monetize the data. Would probably make an interesting time series info-graphic.

Any past experiences you could share?

I do that with marathon entries. The worst offender by far has been the Rock N Roll series, who sold my email (runrocksoldthisemail@example.com) to several races throughout California. I chuckle every time something occasionally comes in to that address. 9/10 would recommend.

The right way to get notified when SARS-CoV-2 is near you is to follow the news and official sources, and whomever put this service up should be ashamed of themselves.

Ashamed? Some people prefer push over pull. Following the news is unhealthy in its own way.

Yes, ashamed. Prefer? This is not the time to have preferences, but regardless, there are official sources that send you notifications.

You will know when the virus is near you before the operator of this service has a chance to update their data. The service is useless and any minimal false sense of security it gives could harm people by making them a bit less likely to follow official information sources and to prepare in time.

> there are official sources that send you notifications.

Feel free to link them. Brief googling didn't turn up any for me.

It depends on the country, in the US you should subscribe to CDC alerts and follow the news.

https://www.cdc.gov/publichealthgateway/healthalerts/index.h...

In South Korea people get emergency alerts on their phones whenever they enter an area that is affected.

This strategy may be used by other countries too in the near future, so check if emergency alerts are configured on your phone.

Which one of those will tell me when covid 19 is in my city and not bother me otherwise? Supposing I'm not willing to bet that my government will be operating with the efficiency of South Korea's, I mean.

If there's no official data, the service won't have it either.

Fear as a Service

aka "the media".

Unfortunately so, but it does get clicks and eyeballs.

Morpheus: “Wha’tt if I said — we monetized it, successfully, Neo.”

This is one service where I am perfectly fine if I never receive any notification

Cool idea. It's a shame it doesn't accept TLDs like .party, though.

Nor does it accept "+" characters in the email address localpart, as allowed in RFC822 (1982).

I recently learned that single words are considered valid email addresses... e.g. "foo" or "root".

Isn’t that how mail gets routed to local user mailboxes?

Yes, exactly. I just never expected an email parser to recognize those cases.

Its like nip alert, but somehow worse.

This is a fantastic example of "app marketing". Build a simple app that is genuinely useful, then include a small link to the app creator. It is a great, non-BS (cough cough content marketing/SEO) way to drive new traffic.

50% of the app creator menu's links land to a 404.:')

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