Does Google and Apple secretly track contacts on your phone?

A lot of posts have appeared on social media, claiming that Google and Apple have installed an application to track contacts in your phone without your permission, as these publications also provided some screen shots as evidence that they hidden the application in your phone to track you without your knowledge.

Are these allegations true?

As a user of the Android or iOS operating system, you should know that what Apple and Google are doing is developing code for an emerging Corona virus tracking system that is integrated into the operating system, and allows health agencies to use it to create apps to track contacts, to facilitate tracking of people who They may be infected with the Corona virus and identified.

It is true that there are some contact tracking apps launched by some governments that have collected questionable data, which made concerns grow among users that Google and Apple are tracking them against them, and they appeared as posts on social media, but these concerns proved to be incorrect.

Although Google has updated Google Play services, and Apple has released an iOS 13.5 update, all that has been added is to give the ability to track the contacts you install to interact with your phone at the system level so that these apps can Send alerts and exposure notifications.

Where Google and Apple mentioned in a joint statement last May: "What we have built is not an application in the well-known sense, but public health agencies will integrate the programming API that we have developed into their own applications that people install, as our technology is designed to make these applications work in a way Best".

So the only way a contact tracking app can appear on your phone is by downloading and installing it manually and giving it permission to track your data, and you probably never have to install one if you don't want to.

In addition to that, we find that all contact tracking applications that rely on the code developed by Google and Apple will have a unified way to track the contacts in your phone, through the use of bluetooth communication signals mainly between the other phones that your phone communicates with, and this does not include these The records are any identifying information about you, as frequently used random digital ID codes are used, and they are deleted completely as soon as 14 days have passed, which is the incubation period of the Coronavirus.

You can also delete these records from your phone manually, and then you will have full control over the data that is being tracked, where you go and who can access it, not to mention the applications or devices that we choose to use in the first place.