As an unfathomably large and powerful international corporation, it makes sense that people are generally wary of Google, in the same way that space truckers are wary of any boss that tells them to land on an alien planet and inspect unknown life signs. Some Massachusetts residents are feeling that way right now, after noticing that the state's official COVID contract tracing app was installed on their phones, allegedly without any alert or permission.
The accusations come in the form of user reviews in the Exposure Notifications Settings Feature - MA app on the Play Store, invariably leaving one star. Ycombinator posted the story soon after. While a lot of the reviews follow the accusation with the kind of conspiracy theories that have become a mainstay of any topic close to the coronavirus, users complaining of third-party apps being downloaded to their hardware without consent certainly do have a legitimate grievance. As the saying goes: if they can do it for a good reason, they can do it for a bad one.
