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                iPhone COVID-19 Exposure Notifications Shut Down

   Adam Engst

   I awoke this morning to a notification on my iPhone informing me that
   New York State's COVID-19 exposure notifications had been turned off
   (see '[1]A Tour of New York State's COVID Alert NY App,' 2 October
   2020). I never received a single notification about a possible
   exposure, which I suppose is good, and I had so completely forgotten
   about the joint Apple/Google system by October 2022 that I forgot to
   record my own positive test. An Apple consultant friend in Seattle told
   me today that he had received several notifications, but he is the
   first person I've spoken to who has seen any.

   Although the privacy aspects of the Apple/Google system were seemingly
   well-thought-out (see '[2]Apple and Google Partner for
   Privacy-Preserving COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Notification,' 10 April
   2020, and '[3]Former Apple Engineer: Here's Why I Trust Apple's
   COVID-19 Notification Proposal,' 11 May 2020), my understanding is that
   [4]the system failed to attract sufficient users to make it effective.
   Many individuals didn't want to know if they had been exposed because
   they couldn't afford to quarantine, and distrust of tech giants,
   government, and science in general hurt adoption. I suspect we'll never
   learn how many people signed up.

   I was much more impressed with the NOVID approach (see '[5]NOVID
   Provides COVID-19 Early Warning System,' 21 January 2021), which had
   the potential to let individuals assess their personal risk and could
   have been a valuable tool for mapping the spread of other infectious
   diseases. It also failed to attract enough users'only 14 people ever
   signed up in my ZIP code, and most were related to me.

   It's sad that a service like TikTok can amass over 1 billion users
   while so many people shy away from technologies that could have reduced
   the death toll of over 1.1 million people in the US and 6.9 million
   worldwide.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/2020/10/02/a-tour-of-new-york-states-covid-alert-ny-app/
   2. https://tidbits.com/2020/04/10/apple-and-google-partner-for-privacy-preserving-covid-19-contact-tracing-and-notification/
   3. https://tidbits.com/2020/05/11/former-apple-engineer-heres-why-i-trust-apples-covid-19-notification-proposal/
   4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/29/omicron-exposure-notification-apple/
   5. https://tidbits.com/2021/01/21/novid-provides-covid-19-early-warning-system/

   Hidden links:
   6. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2023/05/Exposure-Notifications-ended-scaled.jpg

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