" Our Massachusetts-based readers (and anyone who has been to Massachusetts since around June 15th 2021 up to the present) will still have this app on their Android phone – even if they uninstalled it, because it sneakily installs, and if necessary reinstalls itself, without user interaction and without displaying an app icon – long after Massachusetts ended its contacting-tracing programme. The number of affected devices is anywhere from one to five million. Of course, no normal Android app could have done this, and anyone trying to create such an app would be in serious violation of Google’s Terms of Service, banned from their developer programme and then later arrested at gunpoint by a SWAT team in a no-knock dawn raid, while having one leg chewed off by a Belgian Malinois. The police bodycam footage would then end up on YouTube, where Google would demonetise it for graphic content. But nothing is impossible when Google allows it, which apparently it did. In sum, DPH installed spyware that deliberately tracks and records movement and personal contacts onto over a million mobile devices without their owners’ permission and awareness. On knowledge and belief, that spyware still exists on the overwhelming majority of the devices on which it was installed."
