Hey everyone, Daniel here from Twinbytes with another quick tutorial for you.
This time I wanted to talk about how the apps work on your phone and you may find
some stuff secretly got installed on your phone
such as the COVID app, in particular. There's been
information on the news just recently that talked about downloading an
app for your phone and I wanted to share with you here.
There's one spot in particular if you go to...
...well first of all looking at the app store they're talking about going on to
the Google play store if you're on an
android phone and you can look for the Covid app
and you'll see it there but if you go in your phone settings and you look
under settings google settings and then you'll see
there's a Covid-19 exposure notifications that got installed automatically.
You did not have to go and get it.
It downloaded automatically with a Google play store update.
but it doesn't do anything by itself and it is turned off by default so you
don't have to panic if you're worrying that you didn't want this and it's
already on your phone it's not doing anything by default but
it is a little bit concerning that they just put these updates
in there along with other standard updates.
so you would have to turn it on here, if you didn't want to use it.
but in addition to turning this on you can click on learn
more and it'll give you a bunch of information but i'm going to summarize
it here. In addition to turn it on you did have
to go to the google play store and download the
app and use those two together so i'll explain here how this works
so in addition to turning this on you download the app from the
google play store and what you would do is if you have
been tested and you've been tested positive for Covid-19
then you do have the option to share that in the app
so others would be notified when they're around you within range
if you've been exposed to someone who has
Covid-19 and they've shared that in their app then you'll get a notification on
your phone. The requirements for this is that you
have to have android 6.0 or higher so you can look in your phone settings
to find out what version you're on. The bluetooth settings do need to be
turned on and the location settings need to be on which is a little strange that
a requirement that location settings need to be on
when they clearly also note, in the learn more information,
that they do not track your location.
How it works is really just if you're opted in,
It randomly generates a phone ID which
changes every 10 to 20 minutes and it'll let you know the day it
happened, how long you were in contact with the person,
and the bluetooth signal strength of the person you were in contact with.
They claim that they do not track your location because it's not permitted by
the public health. However the requirements did say that
location settings need to be turned on. so...
that's a little contradictory. Let me know what you think
in the comments below. Anyway, as far as the privacy of this thing
you do need to still opt in, you need to turn on the
google services, you've got to download the program,
it's up to you to share in the program that you've been tested positive.
It won't happen automatically and it does generate that random code
every 10 20 minutes for your phone. Your phone ID, there is no personal ID
no personal identifiable information is shared within this program and they
claim no location is being tracked as I mentioned.
so a little bit of contradictory in there but
it is totally optional. Now if you want to disable all this see it's
it's off by default just don't download the app from the google
play store but in addition to that there might be something else that you want to do.
As a bonus here that does not
specifically work only for the Covid-19 app.
Now it's disabling the bluetooth NFC. NFC stands for Near
Field Communication, and it's a technology that enables bluetooth
devices to establish wireless communication with
each other, simply by touching the devices together.
this is used if you're going to be paying for something at a store with
your phone where you tap your phone and you're able to send your bank
information through there and it pays for it. but it
also allows people to gather other information you
can transfer straight from one phone to another.
So as far as security goes, you are at risk if somebody were to
pretend they accidentally bumped into you
and their phone touches your phone and they just received your contact
information. There's all kinds of ways that people
can take advantage of that service. So that's it for this
tech-torial. I hope you found it helpful. If you did please give it a thumbs up
subscribe if you haven't already and stay tuned for future videos.
Thanks, bye for now.