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Comment by dingusdew | Hacker News Reader

Exposure Notifications is probably already dead. It's dead in Washington state, which is also where it was originally developed alongside Google. If it's not being used in the state that it was developed in initially, it's doubtfully being used nationwide. Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.

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Exposure Notifications was a great try by Google and Apple. If it weren't a thing, most big government would develop more privacy invasive contact tracing app. It seems that it wasn't worked well, but still a great try.

The German "Corona Warn App" (CWA) is pretty good from a privacy POV. It works along the same lines as the Google/Apple ones I think (trading tokens over Bluetooth, then publishing a list of "infected" tokens when you submit a positive test result, risk severity being based on how many tokens you match, i.e. how long you were in the same space). The difference is that it isn't tied to any American corporation.

Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.

CWA was using the Exposure Notifications from Apple and Google[0].

Exposure Notifications is not an app, but a framework and a protocol, and CWA was an implementation of it, hooking in the features developed by Apple and Google for iOs and Android

[0]: https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/blob/ma...

Ah, I was under the impression Google and Apple had created their own separate apps and these third-party apps merely worked on the same principle. It's interesting that the document you linked indicates the interoperability between different countries' apps was down to an EU-wide standard. I guess this meant the apps of different EU countries were compatible but only with each other.

I trust my government much more than I trust Google and Apple not to invade my privacy.

They’re all 100% so is there any difference?

Parent was referring to the major world powers (US, Western Europe, China), who all run massive illegal spying operations and share data with allies.

Google and Apple don't run prisons, and don't employ (that many) dudes with machine guns.

> Perhaps other parts of the world still use it, but the US no longer gives a rats ass.

Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.

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