"Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private—But It Wasn't"
Investigations at The Markup have revealed some worrying bugs in Google’s contact tracing implementation.
Researchers say hundreds of preinstalled apps can access a log found on Android devices where sensitive contact tracing information is stored.
Color me unsurprised.
But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it.
All that work to preserve privacy and a log file was left wide open… Move fast and break things, huh?
Jim Bagrow
Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics
My research interests include complex networks, computational social science, and data science.