Massachusetts and Google installed trackers on 1M phones | Hacker News Reader

Massachusetts and Google installed trackers on 1M phones

perfectingequilibrium.substack.com

14 pointsbarry-cotter5 comments

Thank you Google and MA for offering proof positive of what should have been obvious all along --- you don't really own your phone, Google does. And they can do what they want with it.

By this definition, Apple and all the COVID tracker agencies that integrated with them installed trackers on all the iPhones.

The only difference between the Google implementation and the Apple implementation is that the Google implementation required an app install to configure which system to report positives to and to get positive tracker IDs from, while Apple did not require an app install to get that configuration.

The claim that the app was automatically activated, configuring data to be sent to and from MA, was made out of whole cloth by the blogger. Here is an accurate description of the lawsuit from when it was filed: https://archive.is/2022.11.22-132721/https://www.bostonglobe...

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The Boston globe reports the app sent and received data without activation.

So while the blog may be wrong in the strict sense that the app was not automatically activated, it seems to be using a 'activated' in a different (and IMO more a accurate) way. Most people would consider something active if it's communicating via bluetooth.

That's not the app. The app simply configures where to send positive reports to and where to download positive IDs from. The app has no access to Bluetooth. Separately, the user can turn on whether they want to send and receive IDs to nearby devices.

The app itself can't even ask the phone to directly start communicating with other devices. It can ask the phone to show a consent screen for the user to agree to in order for the phone to start communicating those IDs with nearby devices, after which the phone will start doing so. https://developers.google.com/android/exposure-notifications...

The actual complaint is that Google and Massachusetts used storage on the phone. Apple also used storage on the phone for the same purpose.

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