Following waves of privacy concerns, Apple and Google have both confirmed that they’ll willingly disable the coronavirus tracker that is coming to mobile devices once the pandemic is over. Apple published a series of mini-updates to a FAQ page about the tracker, most of which is set to help ignite America ‘s attempt at contact tracing.
Privacy advocates after the announcement quickly pounced on some of the concerns. Following those complaints, it appears that a number of consequential changes are coming.
- Encryption keys and what not will now be randomly generated, rather than derived from a user’s private key.
Other privacy advocates argued that without complete and total encryption, it could be fairly easy to link diagnosis to people’s fingerprints and digital footprint created by the keys.
This video from The Verge lays it out pretty clearly what this application is meant to do.