Tag: location

  • Watching Your iPhone Work to Protect You from Covid-19

    Much has been written about the Apple + Google Covid-19 Exposure Notification framework. This is the software that is now part of Android and iOS (13.5+) and powers Covid-19 detection apps for Android and iPhone like COVID Alert (much of Canada), COVIDWISE (Virginia) and dozens of other jurisdictions around the world .

    I’m in Ontario and use COVID Alert on my iPhone 8 Plus. The apps are fantastic pieces of work from the Canadian Digital Service and its private sector partners Shopify and BlackBerry. That said, I have always wished for more feedback from the app itself. Something that gives me a sense of it actually working. I’m the first to admit that this isn’t a rational need. When you open COVID Alert here is what you see:


    Great! You’re active! But what does that mean?

    I’m grateful that no exposure has been detected! But the app doesn’t look like it’s doing anything. I know that that’s not the case. I know that it is doing stuff but that’s because I’m a nerd and because the Canadian Digital Service maintains the source for both the Android and iPhone COVID Alert apps on GitHub .

    But how can I see it actually doing stuff?

    Well here’s one way. Both iPhone and Android allow you to see a log showing each time COVID Alert has downloaded a list of exposures from the COVID Alert server.

    On iPhone you can see the log in Settings -> Exposure Notifications -> Exposure Logging Status -> Exposure Checks .

    What I believe this means is that in that one Exposure Check done at 10:09am ET COVID Alert downloaded 246 Tracing Keys (“device IDs”) of devices that had had a positive Covid-19 test reported over the past 14 days. It also determined that my iPhone did not get close enough to any of those phones, for a long enough period of time, to warrant me getting a Covid-19 test. It’s pretty cool to see the app at work.

    What else could it do?

    I would also love the app to help me understand:

    1. How risky is my current behaviour?
      How many devices did my phone see in the past 24 hours? How many rolling proximity identifiers (RPIDs) did my phone log? I know that you are not supposed to be able to derive a Tracing Key from an RPID, but could the system run a function over a set of RPIDs and estimate the number of unique Tracing Keys they represent?
    2. How effective is the app at warning people about potential exposure?
      We had 625 new cases of Covid-19 reported yesterday in Ontario. How does that compare to the 246 Tracing Keys my phone received? Do the time frames line up? Can I compare them? What’s the effective penetration of the app?

    Closing thoughts

    You can’t tech your way out of a policy or political problem. That said, I strongly agree with the what Apple, Google, and the Government of Canada have done here. If the policy decision is to continue to deploy these decentralized, anonymous exposure notification applications on a voluntary basis then we need to keep looking for ways to make them more effective and more compelling to download and use. Sharing more useful information with people could be a way to get more people to use the app and better inform public health authorities on what to do next.

  • Location 2012

    • users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone — this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy
    • carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web — they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives
    • device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so — why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?
    Nevertheless, this is the most complete description of the future that I’ve seen to date, and is worth a read.
  • Check-ins are a hack.

    Now that the f8 keynote has passed, everyone is wondering why Facebook didn’t launch a check-in feature. The reality is that check-ins are just a hack — a workaround for the fact that smart phones are still pretty dumb when it comes to location — at least in terms of the features that App developers can freely use. Smarter devices, near-field communication (NFC), better applications and more savvy advertisers are going to revolutionize how we go about our daily business. Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb just nailed it:

    This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case) – as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there – approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users.

    Steve Chaney also runs through the limitations of current devices, and what it will take for products to succeed in this space.

    Facebook realizes that they don’t need a check-in feature – what they need is reliable, in-store location detection. And they now have the heft to push device vendors, carriers, app developers and retailers into rolling this out.

  • When Location Matters

    Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference.

    Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community. Having this data – and the basic services, like check-in, that you need to collect it – is only the first step. Owning a collection of users with locations, friends, and interests gives you the foundation of a useful, location-based mobile service. The exciting question is what gets built on that foundation. (Chris Dixon dubbed all of this the geo stack.)

    To make a real business you’ve got to build something on top that someone – a consumer, advertiser, or both – will actually pay for. There are a few different approaches already in use:

    • The Listings Business (Yelp and others)
    • The Local Coupon Business (foursquare, Yelp, Aloqa…)
    • The Search Ads Business (Google Local Search, Yahoo!…)
    • Virtual Currency / In-Game Items (myTown)
    • Premium Services (Skout)
    • Subscription Services (Traffic.com, Inrix, and others)

    What’s interesting is that we’re seeing innovation in both the free to consumer and pay-per-use models. Unlike the wired web, mobile web is taking off after users are already used to paying for services used on their phones – even if they’re just buying ringtones. Apple and Google (and, arguably, Microsoft with Zune) have removed a lot of the friction by setting up online payment platforms and providing strong incentives to get users connected. So all you have to do is tap buy.

    That said, relatively few of these applications are really enabled by the mobile context. Local search, most mobile games, and traffic information is almost as useful on a PC as it is on a phone. The most interesting apps – like Skout – make immediate use of your location to provide something of value. They’re still limited by hardware – for example, you can’t do location-based notification on an iPhone – but you can see where things are going.

  • foursquare – Like twitter, but Useful 🙂

    foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can:

    • identify what city the user is in
    • read/write user and friends’ check-in data
    • look up information for a particular location
    • make/send friend requests
    • retrieve venue data
    • perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins
    • add venues, tips, and to-dos

    This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are? Or a navigation app that automatically checks in when I arrive at a location? It also opens up some interesting possibilities for advertisers. Want to create a location-aware application that can target relevant local offers – build a foursquare-aware version of Urbanspoon.

    You could also use it to push foursquare data out of their own user base and to the public at large. For example, I could build an uber-app that would allow me to tell my family that I’m running late for Thanksgiving dinner, bundle in some traffic data to estimate an ETA, and push notifications out to foursquare, twitter, or even plain old SMS.

    The comparisons to twitter are obvious but understated. Unlike twitter, foursquare has a historical record of high-value, targetable, structured data. It’s hard to make sense of a single twitter stream, let alone millions of them. But location data has structure – it can easily be parsed and sorted; relationships can be identified between people, locations, times – and that can be used to target advertising, tailor mobile services or even implement discretionary pricing.

    Unlike twitter, an open foursquare solves a user, carrier, and advertiser problem with ready, revenue generating implications. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Scoble was right – foursquare will be bigger than twitter.