Android

17658 readers

231 users here now

The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!

Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.

💡Content Philosophy:

Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.

Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: [email protected]

For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: [email protected]

💬Matrix Chat

💬Telegram channels / chats

📰Our communities below

Rules

Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.
No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to [email protected].
Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to [email protected].
No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.
No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.
No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.
No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.
No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.
No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!
No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.

Quick Links

Our Communities

Lemmy App List

See thread

Chat and More

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

247

Android is removing COVID-19 exposure notification settings (9to5google.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I ended up getting a few alerts, and each time I tested negative. Then later during Omicron, I ended up getting Covid and was contacted by a contact tracer for the city. I explained to them if they give me the code for the app, I can signal that I have Covid, and they said it wasn't worth it.

Overall I think it was an interesting idea, and the approach was pretty clever while also maintaining privacy. Really the failure was from the municipalities being out of the loop. I'm not sure if there were studies done, but I do wonder how accurate the exposure determination was, since for me it was always false positives.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I ended up getting a few alerts, and each time I tested negative...but I do wonder how accurate the exposure determination was, since for me it was always false positives.

How are you determining you got a false positive? The app alerts you if you were exposed to someone with COVID while out and about in your day. Just because you didn't catch COVID from your exposure does not mean the app gave you a false positive. Just that you weren't close to them long enough and/or your immune system, hygiene, or luck fought it off.

Only way you could really say you got a "false positive" was if you got an alert, for a certain day but knew that you had 0 interaction with people (you never left the house and no one came over during your alert).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think there probably can be adjustments made with more research, which at the time was unrealistic, since we were in the middle of it. For the alerts to be meaningful, they should be actionable, and receiving an alert should tell the person they should take a test. If 9 times out of 10 the alert turns up a negative covid test, then it's not really reliable, and people won't see use in taking them seriously (aka Alarm Fatigue). Fine tuning the parameters of the alert can improve this rate, for example requiring longer durations in close proximity and/or closer distance between devices.

Of course dialing things too extreme would lead to "false negatives" which would be even harder to test for and validate, because of the nature of the recorded history on the device. Ideally there'd be 0 false negatives and 0 false positives, where every alert resulted in a positive covid test, and no positive covid test wasn't prompted by an alert. This is obviously unrealistic, but finding a good balance would make the alerts reliable, and useful. Since this system is going away, it doesn't really matter, but the principals of alerting are still important to consider in any system, especially where health & safety are involved.