Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge • Hacker News Board

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#251

Post by ganzuul » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #143

ganzuul wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is it. I did notice it's not the case anymore, but do you know if they admitted error with the change, or gave any kind of motivation? I think that in this context, this previous issue is relevant.

Were you just guessing their motivation before, when you wrote "Claimed their users were too ill-informed to know the difference."?

Not guessing no, but I distilled what they said unfavorably. My understanding was that they thought they could not communicate to their customers the complexity of how bluetooth can be used to infer information about location. But somehow this communications barrier meant that they thought it was better to expose GPS data too? - Hence why I feel justified treating them unfavorably in this case. It was just an absurd way to reason that they presented. It should have been obvious that it's better to protect as much data as possible when the user often has no choice but to enable bluetooth.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#252

Post by combolo » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

Metacelsus wrote: post #179

I'm an Android user in MA and I don't seem to have this app installed.

You need to go the Google Play store page for the app to see if it's installed: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.ma.covid19...

The app will NOT show up on your App drawer.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#253

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #167

arpstick wrote: post #90

a government installing a software without notice or consent onto their population's devices is not something a healthy functioning democracy does, it's what a psychotic paranoid despot does. if the Mass Gov truly wants to minimize harm this is the opposite of what needs to be done. all this will do is drive conspiracy theories and deepen a very legitimate mistrust in the institutions that plague the USA (which helpe…

>"if the Mass Gov truly wants to minimize harm this is the opposite of what needs to be done." where is the actual evidence for this? Both Taiwan and South Korea deployed massive, digital tracking efforts to respond to covid often at the cell-provider/ infrastructure level so the entire population was covered whether they wanted to or not. Nothing about this was despotic or paranoid, it was simply the correct, swift,…

It's the power of defaults that make them easy to abuse. To the point of that study, Richard Thaler who has studied the subject extensively argues more easy mandated choice (i.e. you have to make a choice one way or another when you sign up for a drivers license). Opt-out is a sufficiently powerful default that it's reasonable to assume that many never made an actual reasoned decision to do so. For trivial matters, it may not matter much, but in the case of something like organ donation families can and have argued successfully that the deceased never actually made a choice in the case of opt-out.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#254

Post by sp332 » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #230

mandmandam wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. Still, the point I was making is that Google absolutely lied about what their app was sending; and people who distrust them are more than justified to. The privacy virtues of the Irish app in particular were the subject of much lauding - when it was shortly after :proven: to be bullshit, that story got less than 1% of the traction.

The contact tracing apps send basically nothing. It's the rest of Android that's the issue. The point is that installing the contact tracing apps doesn't track you any more than before, neither on microg+fdroid than on a google stack.

If someone has stock Android with Google Play Services disabled, the app won't work. The instructions to install the app don't mention installing a replacement, they tell users to enable Google Play Services.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#255

Post by slumdev » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

tunap wrote: post #234

marvindanig wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, given that a significant percentage of citizenry is anti-vaxxer-level-stupid, there isn't much improvement over people trusting their local Government either…

Considering in a not too distant yesterday(pre-Covid) the "anti-vaxxers" were all liberal/granola types and now they are magically all conservative/racist types, perhaps you may want to re-assess your 2-dimensional view of the real world. I believe a cogent example was on the front-page of HN just a day or two ago, but IANYG.

"Not too distant" means only five years ago. The "anti-vaxxers" were people who lived in primarily white, primarily wealthy, primarily urban or suburban environments and who refused (usually) the MMR vaccine.

You don't find measles outbreaks in rural Mississippi. You find them in Washington, New York, and California. [1]

So it's pretty rich to label someone as an "anti-vaxxer" for refusing the experimental, emergency-use, mRNA jabs, when that person has never demonstrated even the slightest hesitancy about receiving or administering every other approved vaccine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_resurgence_in_the_Unit...

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#256

Post by bostik » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

oigursh wrote: post #125

de6u99er wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is obvious that we need better legislation to deal with all the new possibilities that technologies have opened. How about applying common sense?

Common sense is not so common.

Common sense is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

- Albert Einstein [0]

0: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ yes, this CAN be attributed to him

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#257

Post by baybal2 » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

kburman wrote: post #203

baybal2 wrote: post #89

FYI: Google can remotely install/delete/alter any app on your phone without your notice if you have GAPPS installed, and they removed the option to disable it back in 2.* days. This is very rampant in India. Operators keep pushing crapware like Linkedin app, clash of kings, etc for money from app vendors.

> This is very rampant in India. Operators keep pushing crapware like Linkedin app, clash of kings, etc for money from app vendors. Are you using Mi phone?

Yes

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#258

Post by rvdmei » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

malka wrote: post #43

rvdmei wrote: post #36

Just the thought of Google being able to do something like this scares the $&@*#% out of me. How on earth can you trust a company that does something like this?

... you trust Google ?

To some extent, but this is beyond what is acceptable. Even if this is so support COVID notifications. Any install on an unmanaged device should be asking for permission to install something, unless you opt-in or something.

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#259

Post by schmorptron » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

fwn wrote: post #180

dstaley wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every non-trivial Android application has these permissions, none of which are even important enough for the system to prompt you for permission. The only interesting one is "pair with Bluetooth devices" which is how the Exposure Notifications system works.

"full network access" is a hugely important permission. My cynical side believes that the reason for it not being as visible as other permissions is that platforms profit from the ad-driven app model, which itself heavily relies on an apps ability to access the internet. That could also be why stock roms do not allow users to disable full network access on a per app basis. (...like, for example, the camera permission…

Yeah, this also seems like the most logical reason to me. If your business depends on people seeing ads in apps, why give them the possibility to circumvent them?

Re: Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

#260

Post by remram » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

TomOwens wrote: post #140

Most of the comments on that app as well as here are probably wrong. I'd suspect that everyone who had the app "installed without their permission" opted into the Android COVID-19 Exposure Notification program. This was deployed by Google as part of an update to Google Play Services. When you go to your phone's settings with this update, there's an option to enable COVID-19 Exposure Notifications. When you turn it on…

I wasn't opted in. I have recently moved to Massachusetts, the app was probably installed during the last system update. I remember seeing a prompt after rebooting my phone to finish the update (this week, Pixel 3a) to enable contact tracing. I said no, but obviously the app had already been installed automatically, and apparently stayed.