CoronaMelder will give warnings again from Saturday at 17:00 pm

The CoronaMelder app for Android will again provide notifications from 5 p.m. on Saturday to people who have been in contact with people who turn out to have the corona virus. Standard apps on smartphones had access to the data of the app.

When the temporary stop on notifications was deployed earlier this week, Google already indicated that the update that fixes the problem has been rolled out for a few weeks. It was then expected that early next week all Android devices will have the update for Google Play Services. Despite the fact that the rollout is not yet complete, the app is still being used again.

The experts from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport have investigated whether the leak in the relevant Play Services update has actually been fixed and have come to the same conclusion as Google. That is why Minister De Jonge of VWS decides to put the app back into operation from 5 p.m. The app will also work through its notification backlog after reactivation, so possible infections from the past few days are not missed by this temporary stop.

The Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport wrote in a letter to parliament that the random codes that CoronaMelder generates on Android phones were stored in ‘the general system file’, which pre-installed standard apps also have access to. In theory, access to the data made it possible for standard apps to determine whether the phone belongs to someone who has been reported as infected in CoronaMelder and which encounters have taken place. For the latter, several data sources had to be combined, because only random codes are visible. According to Google, there is no evidence that apps have actually collected and used data. Apple doesn’t have the problem.