If it was not bad enough in April, 2020 Google and Apple silently force installed Covid-19 Tracking Apps on U.S. Phones.
Reference: COVID-19 Contact-Tracking Devices Your Phones
Well looks like they are at it again only now they have done it again. Google is force-installing a Massachusetts COVID-19 tracking app on residents’ Android devices without an easy way to uninstall it.
For the past few days, users have reported that Google silently installed the Massachusetts ‘MassNotify‘ app on their devices without the ability to open it or find it in the Google Play Store.
“This installed silently on my daughter’s phone without consent or notification. She cannot have installed it herself since we use Family Link and we have to approve all app installs. I have no idea how they pulled this off, but it had to involve either Google, or Samsung, or both,” a user wrote in a review on the Google Play Store.
“Normal apps can’t just install themselves. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but this doesn’t count as “voluntary”. We need information, and we need it now, folks.”
MassNotify is Massachusetts’ COVID-19 contact tracing app that allows users who have opted into Android’s ‘COVID-19 Exposure Notifications’ feature to be warned when exposed to the virus.
When opting into this feature, users can select the country and state they want to receive notifications from, and the corresponding states app will be installed on the device
Source: BleepingComputers
Update Google Responds:
Google, in a statement to several news outlets, did not confirm or deny whether the “automatically distributed” system was installed without users’ consent, while noting that “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications are enabled only if a user proactively turns it on.”