Rather Suspect

Today I’d like to propose three questions:

1) Based purely on how you’ve used your smartphone over the last 24 hours, do you think Google, Apple, or another tech company could determine your location, at least to within a mile?

2) Based purely on your communication history — whether through social media sites, email, or messaging — do you think one or more of those tech companies could guess, with a reasonable degree of certainty, at least a few of the people you’ve spent the most time with over the past 48 hours?

3) Do you believe a set of developers could create an app, within, say, 60 days or less, which enabled you to share whether you tested positive for covid and post that information in a reasonably-anonymous way to a central database?

If you answered “yes” to the above three questions, then I’d like to propose a fourth:

4) Why is it that, over a two-year-long pandemic that impacted every person on the planet, there never arose features in any of the major tech platforms which alerted you personally when your own risk was rising or falling?

Yes, of course Apple and Google worked on the “notification” system you find on your phone today, and which was rolled out on a state-by-state basis. But why was that even necessary?

Given the companies already have the data listed above — and given they already use it to make recommendations around products and services you should purchase — why was it that data was never repurposed in a way to serve the global community as it fought the pandemic?

Imagine an alert appearing at the top of a Facebook feed, for example, stating “the risk in your own social network has risen recently — consider reducing your social interactions for the next ten days.” It seems such an indicator would have been well within any number of companies’ capacity to create. Was it that such a feature wouldn’t have been helpful? Or was it that these companies didn’t want to draw attention to the fact they have this level of detailed information already?