A covid-fighting tool is buried in your phone. Turn it on.

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Wed, 2020-11-18 15:41 — mike kraft

Review | A covid-fighting tool is buried in your phone. Turn it on. Millions of Americans now have access to free, anonymous coronavirus exposure notifications. Too bad so few people use them. Geoffrey Fowler Washington Post

Here’s a phone alert you wouldn’t want to miss: “You have likely been exposed.”

The coronavirus surge is upon us, and your phone might be able to help. About 100 million Americans now have the ability to get pop-up notifications from local health authorities when they’ve personally spent time near someone who later tested positive for the coronavirus.

But exposure notifications only work if you and the people around you turn them on. ...

There’s early evidence this anonymous smartphone technology works — but so far isn’t helping very many Americans. In August, I wrote about the first of these state-sponsored alerts, Virginia’s Covidwise app. In the three months since, only 488 people have used the state’s app to send alerts about a positive diagnosis to others.

Got a question about covid-19 exposure apps and services? Ask our tech columnist.

The alerts use software built by Apple and Google into iPhones and Android devices to detect when people (or the phones they’re holding) get into close contact with each other. That might sound like a privacy invasion, but they figured out how to track encounters between people in a way that’s anonymous — and doesn’t store your location — by using the Bluetooth wireless technology in phones.

Wwhy aren’t our phones a big part of America’s coronavirus response? For starters, each state’s local health department has to develop and operate its own system (though they’ve recently begun making them work across borders). Privacy concerns about similar-sounding — but actually very different — contact-tracing apps have needlessly scared people away. And frankly, Apple and Google buried the settings and apps you’ll need, bungling what could have been the year’s most-helpful tech launch.

You don’t have much to lose, so you might as well turn exposure alerts on. It takes less than five minutes to set up, and this guide will help.

As of Nov. 17, 15 U.S. states and territories, plus D.C., support coronavirus exposure alerts. Here arelinks to instructions from the local health department offering them: ...

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