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Canada's 'COVID Alert' App Using Apple's Exposure Notification API Now Available

gaximus said:
That’s like saying Walmart has a monopoly on what they put on their shelves.
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No, it's like saying that Walmart controls the furniture in your house. It's your house - you own it, you pick what furniture goes in it.

Similarly, the iPhone is yours. It should be up to you what apps you want in it and where you get them from. You want to exclusively get furniture from Walmart for your house? You go ahead - no reason anyone else should be forced to do that. You want to exclusively get apps from Apple? Go ahead - do the same thing on your Mac.

Have you installed anything on your Mac not from the macOS App Store? The absolute horror! Why would you ever do that!? Oh wait, yeah, there's tons of great macOS software not on the macOS App Store. Similarly, there'd be tons of great iOS software beyond what you can currently get on the iOS app store. But there's no easy way to get it, because Apple set up barriers that benefit absolute nobody but them, and so that software simply isn't developed. People say "wouldn't it be great if the iPhone could do that?", remember that one of Apple's hundreds of arbitrary rules that benefit nobody disallows it, so that app doesn't get made. Or maybe it's an Android exclusive.
 
Mr. Heckles said:
I agree. I hope someone knows of one for the USA. I actually downloaded this one and when it asked what providence I am in, I hit "prefer not to say". I'm thinking as long as it uses Apple's API, it should work? I can't see why it wouldn't.
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There's no way for a person to enter that they tested positive in areas that it is not supported, so it won't do much for you.
 
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bodonnell202 said:
There's no way for a person to enter that they tested positive in areas that it is not supported, so it won't do much for you.
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Also, it downloads the list of confirmed positives from the regional government who's listed wouldn;t contain confirmed positives in your area.
 
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cocky jeremy said:
Yeah. Call me crazy but I'll take my chances against a virus that 99.9% of people survive. lol.
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It's not about you — it's for the people you will infect. And I wouldn't put too much faith in those numbers. We test on average 0.03% of the population a day (it also tends to be the same people like healthcare workers unless they had direct exposure to someone confirmed to have it). At our peak we were testing just under 800K in a nation of 330m so there are a lot of people who have died and weren't tested so they haven't had COVID attributed to their deaths.

Most importantly you could be carrying it asymptomatically, so while YOU may be ok, your elderly loved ones or friends with underlying respiratory issues, co-workers and essential staff at stores, hospitals and anywhere else you may patron get a gift from you that could very well kill them, impact their lively hood (due to extended quarantine) or carry long term side effects. I guess it depends on how selfish you want to be.
 
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Websnapx2 said:
It's not about you — it's for the people you will infect. And I wouldn't put too much faith in those numbers. We test on average 0.03% of the population a day (it also tends to be the same people like healthcare workers unless they had direct exposure to someone confirmed to have it). At our peak we were testing just under 800K in a nation of 330m so there are a lot of people who have died and weren't tested so they haven't had COVID attributed to their deaths.

Most importantly you could be carrying it asymptomatically, so while YOU may be ok, your elderly loved ones or friends with underlying respiratory issues, co-workers and essential staff at stores, hospitals and anywhere else you may patron. I guess it depends on how selfish you want to be.
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Do we know long term also? Will surviors have issues in 10-20, or even 30 years from now? People who get chicken pox can get shingles later in life.
 
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Mr. Heckles said:
Do we know long term also? Will surviors have issues in 10-20, or even 30 years from now? People who get chicken pox can get shingles later in life.
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Seriously, we don't. I know there are short-medium term issues like loss of taste and smell that have lasted for months. Continued respiratory issues in those that never previously had them have been widely reported too. I just don't get why anyone would take the risk. It has nothing to do with rights, it's just selfishness.
 
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itsmilo said:
nope they blamed iOS and on android Samsung in particular
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That makes no sense (on a few levels). Samsung has nothing to do with this as they had no involvement and the API doesn't really effect background refresh behaviour (the app does). If they are referring to the dev tools, maybe — that is one aspect they updated just today.
 
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niji said:
a great question.

i think the answer is likely no, given how uncoordinated individual states are, and in light of the lack of any desire to coordinate and lead on the national level, there is no central clearing data base.

a regionally coordinated database of case IDs of positives to testing would be workable and effective.
say, a NY, NJ, Connecticut tri-state coordinated approach makes sense for the greater NY area.

but a public health crisis that doesnt need to stop for gas at a state borders really demands a federal level coordinated response.
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edit: just today 9 to 5 mac is reporting interoperability between countries! yeah!

quote
Another important change is that the companies behind the Exposure Notification API have recalibrated the Bluetooth controllers to improve detection of nearby devices, as this system uses the Bluetooth connection to anonymously identify if a user was close to another person who tested positive for COVID-19.
While the first version of the API didn’t allow different apps to communicate with each other, this new version now supports interoperability between countries.
endquote

9to5mac.com

Apple and Google's COVID-19 Exposure Notification API updated with improvements, Brazil launches app with alerts - 9to5Mac

Apple and Google introduced a new COVID-19 Exposure Notification API in May this year, which allows public health authorities to...
9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com
 
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madmin said:
The app uses services on the internet that rely on DNS, for example notification services. The rest follows, including fingerprinting of devices for identification and tracking.
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And (ideally) nearly every single phone in the country is pinging the central server occasionally for an updated copy of the exposure database. What do you expect them to do with that info? And what additional data do you expect that they can glean from this, that they couldn’t have obtained already from all the other internet traffic your phone is doing (your phone is looking up and pinging all sorts of servers all the time).

The only difference is some small number of phones will be sending in “I tested positive” packets each day. And perhaps doing a DNS lookup on a separate server to send those to. This is countered easily enough by having every phone do a DNS lookup on the testedpositive server roughly every 24 hours, and caching that info. Now you don’t get anything useful by watching the DNS traffic. If you’re particularly paranoid, arrange for the client app to pick a random minute during the day, and then at that moment, pick another random number, with, say, a 1-in-20 chance of “winning”. If it “wins”, it contacts the testedpositive server, but sends a (padded) null packet, that the server knows to discard. But, all the traffic is encrypted, so the casual observer won’t be able to pick out the real report connections from the random null connections.

That’s more or less how I’d design the system, anyway. So, what useful data do you anticipate some shadowy government agency picking up from all this?
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
If Apple didn't have a monopoly on iOS app distribution, we could have a global app made that simply works for everyone. But the fanbois here will insist that Apple doesn't have a monopoly, or even if they admit the monopoly, that the additional security from viruses is worth it.
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You need, of course, some trusted agency acting as a gatekeeper, verifying that test is positive and issuing the recipient some sort of one-time code that allows the recipient to report pin the app that they tested positive. If you don’t have that, you’ll get lots of random idiots clicking the “I tested positive” button just to **** with everyone.

This will be an agency that has some local authority and can interact with the labs/agencies doing the actual COVID testing.

Who are you suggesting has this authority and the necessary resources globally?
 
ArtOfWarfare said:
No. Apple has specified that only governments can make these apps, and that the apps can only be distributed to the citizens of the same territory as the government.

If Apple didn't have a monopoly on iOS app distribution, we could have a global app made that simply works for everyone. But the fanbois here will insist that Apple doesn't have a monopoly, or even if they admit the monopoly, that the additional security from viruses is worth it.

So basically, we've allowed everyone to get an actual virus that kills people so that iOS can be even more free of viruses than MacOS (which is well known for how many viruses it has.)
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So if Apple is the problem why is there no Android version that’s global? When you’re done chasing windmills Mr. Quixote you might want to consider that. This API was co-developed with Google Btw.
 
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cocky jeremy said:
Yeah. Call me crazy but I'll take my chances against a virus that 99.9% of people survive. lol.
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Sure, you’re right, if you’re under 70 your chances of dying are pretty low. How about damage to your heart? Recent studies indicate that 78% of people who have “recovered” from COVID-19 have damage to their heart. This includes people who were never hospitalized. Don’t worry, it’s just a cold, no need to take any precautions... carry on.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916
 
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I hope they have a lot of space for the database since in two years virtually everyone on the planet will have been exposed.
 
bodonnell202 said:
Gloom and doom much? Several vaccines are on track to end this sometime in 2021, so I doubt it will come to that.
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I hope so, but in the history of the world there has never been a successful RNA based vaccine for a corona virus. There have been some along the way that were successful with lab animals, but not humans.
 
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alphaswift said:
Fear-porn. smh. I'm sure the families of your 150,000+ dead Americans agree with you.
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In the USA there are 2,813,503 people die each year among those 647,457 die from heart disease and 599,108 die from cancer (1 million+ combined). Yet hospitals were not mobilized neither for heart disease patients nor for cancer patients nor trillions of dollars spent over those patients. So the government prioritized covid patients over the 1 million + patients that die most, year over a year.
 
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mike9449 said:
I hope so, but in the history of the world there has never been a successful RNA based vaccine for a corona virus. There have been some along the way that were successful with lab animals, but not humans.
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That’s only because there’s never been a need for a coronavirus vaccine in humans (they started working on one for SARS in 2003, but never finished when that epidemic fizzled without needing a vaccine). The vaccine doesn’t need to be RNA based, one of the leading vaccine candidates being developed in Oxford is based on a modified Adenovirus and is already moving to Phase 3 Human trials (and has positive results from Phase 1 trials, Phase 2 results still pending).
 
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