California introduced a COVID-19 exposure-notification system that used iPhone and Android to track interactions with infected people. And now that the U.S. government says the pandemic is over, CA Notify is shut down.
It’s possible Apple will eventually remove the underlying technology from iOS.
Peak COVID: Good times… NOT!
When California introduced CA Notify, over 200,000 people a day were catching COVID-19. Across the globe, the disease killed, on average, 2.3% of the people who caught it, and the fatality rate was much higher among the elderly.
Those who have caught COVID-19 are contagious before they show any symptoms. So CA Notify used smartphones to notify people if they had been near someone who later tested positive for the virus.
It was powered by an API developed jointly by Apple and Google that exchanged anonymous keys between smartphones via Bluetooth. They keys were stored for 14 days on the devices. The system also tracked the length of time two smartphone owners came into contact, as well as the approximate distance between them.
But that’s all in the past. iPhone owners who used CA Notify woke up Friday to an alert stating, “California Department of Public Health has turned off Exposure Notifications. Your iPhone is no longer logging nearby devices and will not be able to notify you of possible exposures.”
End of Apple’s contract-tracing project?
As noted, CA Notify used a contract-tracing system that was quickly built into both iOS and Android OS in 2020 as the pandemic grew in strength around the world. But the U.S. Public Health Emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic officially ended on Thursday. And the World Health Organization said May 5 that the COVID-19 is no longer an emergency.
It appears the need for the tracking system Apple and Google implemented is gone. The system itself may well follow. The two companies just created APIs, not applications. It was up to governments around them world to produce those. And very few did so — with California being one of the rare exceptions.
