More than half a million people have downloaded Los Angeles' first-of-its-kind earthquake early warning app. But some worry about privacy and security.
Others have celebrated
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti explains how to use the new ShakeAlertLA app, available for Android and iOS devices.A: The city receives information about a user’s whereabouts and assigns the device to a broader geographical hexagon, which has about a 5-mile radius. Phones in that area will receive an alert based on that location.
No user data was compromised, but there was an acknowledgement that human errors were made, and officials are making efforts to avoid mistaken releases of passwords.USGS scientist Robert de Groot said in a statement that the compromised account was a “read-only” account, meaning the city could only read the alerts pushed out from a USGS server but not create false data or maliciously send out a fake earthquake warning through the federal government’s system.
Other officials have sought more information about Los Angeles’ app, including authorities in Orange, San Diego and Ventura counties; San Francisco; Seattle; the state of Washington; the water and electricity utility of Eugene, Ore.; and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.A: Adding too many people to receive alerts could suddenly slow down the delivery of the messages, and it’s important for researchers to identify problems and fix them.
Q: The mayor said ShakeAlertLA’s computer programming code will be “open source,” meaning the code will be made public for other cities to use and for other programmers to scour for bugs and suggest improvements. It’s not public right now. Will it be?
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