Deep in the heart of Appalachia, modern science and America's bucolic past meet at a unique crossroad of scientific discovery and luddite lifestyles. The Quiet Zone, by journalist Stephen Kurczy, is the story of a sleepy small town that hosts the Green Bank radio telescope. But the presence of this installation comes at a price: due to the telescope's exceeding sensitivity, virtually every device and appliance that emits radio waves, Wi-Fi signals, or microwave radiation is banned for square miles around. That means that Green Bank, West Virginia has about as much tech today as it did in the 1950's (maybe even a little less) — and some people very much like it that way. But not everybody. In the excerpt below, Pocahontas County attorney, Robert Martin, recounts the challenges of attempting to modernize the region without loosing a horde of gentrifiers upon it as well.        

Harper Collins

Excerpted from the book THE QUIET ZONE: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence by Stephen Kurczy. Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Kurczy. From Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

For every electrosensitive who wanted radio quiet, there were probably one hundred residents who wanted WiFi and cell service, and they elected the county’s officials. In early 2018, the Pocahontas County Commission passed a resolution in support of cell service throughout the county, a challenge to the very notion of a Quiet Zone. The commission assigned its attorney, Robert Martin, to contact all major telecommunications providers asking them to invest in Pocahontas.

“I’m doing my level best to get another company in here,” Martin told me in the spring of 2018. He’d invited me to his house to discuss the new cell service ordinance, and we were swigging Bud Lights at his kitchen table.

“How many cell companies have you written to?” I asked.

“All of them,” he said. “I promised the companies that we’ll get everybody in the damn county to sign up with them. I’ll sign up first! . . . I wrote a letter to everybody and said, ‘We have shit for cellphone service here, we want you to come in here, we’ll partner with you, we’ll help you however we can. Come in here.’”

At our feet were two boxers and a basset hound. In the adjacent mudroom was a 250-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig named Pig, who was snoring. Pig knew how to open the front door and pull a blanket over himself. “I’m the true image of West Virginia, aren’t I?” Martin laughed. “I got a pig living in the house.” Despite his home literally being a pigsty, Martin was always the best dressed at county meetings, usually wearing tight designer jeans, leather boots, and a crisp dress shirt, top buttons undone and a few chest hairs curling out. A blustery guy, Martin was once jailed in Marlinton for contempt of court for arguing with a circuit judge. He had a history of getting into fights at West Virginia University football games. For years, he’d also operated a hotel in Belize, paying “tens of thousands of dollars in bribes” and putting the payments on his tax returns so the U.S. government could see the corruption he was dealing with (even if he was admitting to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). Martin came across as a dogged lawyer who knew how to get things done. And he wanted cell service.

“You seen that commercial saying Verizon has more coverage than anyone else?” he asked me. “Pause and look at it real closely, and you’ll see right where Pocahontas County is because almost the entire Eastern Seaboard is all yellow [signifying cell coverage] and right there in southeastern West Virginia there’s this hunk about this big—it’s Poca-fucking-hontas County. I swear to God. Right fucking there we are on Verizon’s commercials.”

Martin knew well what connectivity was like outside the Quiet Zone. He had earned his law degree from West Virginia University in 1979, married a girl from Marlinton, and started his career in Pocahontas County before becoming a well-heeled insurance defense lawyer in Charleston. He’d gotten his first cellphone in 1986—it was the size of a beer bottle, with a three-foot-long antenna, and it went to bed with him every night. That attachment ended in 2012 when he moved back to Pocahontas, where he only carried an iPhone so he could listen to music in his truck. I asked if he was concerned about the impact of cell service on the electrosensitives.

“Wackos that are afraid of their brains getting fried and all that?” he responded. “Yeah, I know about them.”

“They see Green Bank as a haven,” I said.

“So? So?” He said he wasn’t going to let the electrosensitives keep Pocahontas “behind the curve” for cell service.

“But I’m here because you’re behind the curve,” I said. “That makes this place unique.”

“You think we want to deal with stone knives and axes for the rest of our existence? You’re like these fucking people who move in here and don’t want it to change, that it? We have people who have moved here in the last five to ten years and they don’t want anything to change. They’ve ‘discovered’ Pocahontas County and now nothing can change. Well, fuck, that ain’t the way of the world. We have limitations because of the observatory, because of our topography, because of our insignificant population. But we need to do what we can as government entities to make things available to people.”

“Of course,” Martin added, the cell service would have to comply with the Quiet Zone.

“We believe in the observatory, we don’t want to fuck with them,” he said. “Right now, as you and I are sitting here bullshitting, they’re up there looking for fucking E.T. And I want to give them every opportunity to do that. But I’ve got emergency services I’ve got to render in this county.”

In addition to trying to bring in cell service, Martin was assisting the county’s emergency services director, Michael O’Brien, to improve communications. The 911 center in Marlinton had difficulty broadcasting any emergency radio communications toward the northern end of the county, where Green Bank was located. O’Brien found a partial solution by installing an internet-controlled radio system just north of Green Bank in the town of Durbin, but it had minimal range and failed altogether when internet or electricity went down. Pocahontas was also one of the only counties in the state unable to adopt a “smart radio system” that integrated radios with smartphones.

On the off chance that someone made an emergency 911 call from one of the county’s few pockets of limited cell service, authorities had an especially hard time pinpointing the person’s location. “We had a dispatcher spend two and a half hours on the phone one night with a lady that was trapped in her car in a creek,” O’Brien told me. “She didn’t know where she was or how she got there. We were just keeping her calm while we sent the department to look in all the areas that had cell service.”

ACCORDING TO DELOIT TE, a 10 percent increase in mobile penetration increases total factor productivity—a key component of economic growth modeling—by 4.2 percentage points over the long run. In Pocahontas, businesspeople like Kenneth “Buster” Varner felt they needed all the help they could get to keep the county’s economy puttering along, which meant bringing in cell service.

I first met Varner in early 2017, while eating breakfast at the counter at Station 2. A heavy, jowly man, he had leaned over and asked, “Do you think the gravy is too salty?” As we shoveled down heaping plates of biscuits and sausage gravy, he told me about his various businesses. Aside from owning Station 2, he operated a half dozen enterprises involved in logging, excavation, towing, septic pumping, and auto repair. He was also a fire chief. I told him that I imagined a lot of headaches trying to manage all those things within the restrictions of the Quiet Zone.

“You have to realize that we never had cellphone service when everybody else had it, so it wasn’t anything to us,” Varner said. “It’d be more convenient, of course, if it was so you could use your cellphones all the time. But it’s a unique place to live where you don’t have them, and we take a little pride in that.” He noted how the observatory provided jobs and shared its resources, such as lending one of its diesel generators to a funeral home during a recent power outage. “That to me means a lot,” Varner said. “And having the largest telescope in the world out your back door, that’s a pretty neat conversation piece.”

“People can get ahold of me the old-fashioned way,” he added. “Call me on the landline or come look for me.”

Spending more time with Varner, however, I realized that he was hardly a Luddite. When we met again months later in his cluttered office, I found it hard to keep his attention. He kept glancing down at his iPhone to check texts and alerts he was receiving over WiFi. When he took a call, I was left to stare at a poster of a busty woman in a red bikini and firefighter helmet. When he finally put down the iPhone, I told him I was confused. Hadn’t he said he took pride in not using a cellphone?

“I thought it was rude to have a smartphone,” Varner said of his “old” perspective, apparently from just a few months earlier. “I do a lot of business on that phone, more than I ever thought in my wildest dreams that I would do.” I asked if he could ever go back to living without one. “Wouldn’t want to. It’s so handy.”

Varner had an AT&T data plan. He used Siri. He wished all his employees and volunteer firefighters could always be connected through smartphones. Instead, because of the Quiet Zone, he’d invested more than $30,000 in a specially approved radio repeater system to allow his workers to communicate via low-band radio. “I don’t want the observatory to close and for people to lose their jobs,” he said, “but it’d be more convenient for everybody.”

We all could use a little help keeping our homes clean and a robot vacuum can do just that. Some robots, like iRobot's Roomba i7+ and S9+, go one step further by automatically emptying their bins into their clean bases after each job — so you rarely have to take out its trash. These gadgets come with high price tags, but you can grab either of them for less right now at Wellbots. The online retailer has the Roomba i7+ for $699, or $100 off, and the S9+ for $949, or $150 off, when you use the codes 100ENGADGET and 150ENGADGET, respectively, at checkout. While not all-time-low prices, they're the best prices we've seen since April.

Buy Roomba i7+ at Wellbots - $699Buy Roomba S9+ at Wellbots - $949

The Roomba i7+ is one of the more expensive robot vacuums you can get from iRobot and we gave it a score of 87 when it first came out. Not only did it do a good job cleaning both carpeted and hard floors, but it was also quieter than other robot vacuums we've tested. The i7+ also has smart mapping technology so it can keep track of the rooms in your home to clean more efficiently. And like other robo-vacs, you can control the i7+ from your smartphone, plus set cleaning schedules, using the iRobot mobile app.

But the biggest thing that sets the i7+ apart from others is its clean base. After each job, the robot will automatically empty its bin into the clean base so you don't have to worry about it. The clean base itself can hold about 30 jobs worth of dirt, so it won't require constant attention either. The only downside are iRobot's proprietary bags that you'll have to buy for it.

Overall, the i7+ is a good pick if you want a robot vacuum that requires little attention on a daily basis. The Roomba S9+ has all of the same features plus a more corner-friendly design and "power-lift suction," which should help it do a better job deep-cleaning carpets and capturing pet hair.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

If you want to see yourself on screen with Hugh Jackman, this is your chance. The promo for Warner Bros. upcoming Reminiscence movie uses deepfake technology to turn a photo of your face — or anybody's face, really — into a short video sequence with the star. According to Protocol, a media startup called D-ID created the promo for the film. D-ID reportedly started out wanting to develop technology that can protect consumers against facial recognition, but then it realized that its tech could also be used to optimize deepfakes.

For this particular project, the firm created a website for the experience, where you'll be asked for your name and for a photo. You can upload the photo of anybody you want, and the experience will then conjure up an animation for the face in it. The animation isn't perfect by any means, and the face could look distorted at times, but it's still not bad, considering the technology created it from a single picture. 

Reminiscence is a sci-fi thriller about Nick Bannister, a "private investigator of the mind." The idea behind the promo is that you're a client looking into your memories to solve a case. The movie will be shown in theatres on August 20th, but like most new releases these days, it will also be available for streaming on HBO Max.

Engadget

Apple, which basked in ubiquitous praise after refusing to cooperate with federal authorities following the 2016 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, is now aggressively walking back its plans to unilaterally scan customers' phones for child porn on behalf of governments following a swift and furious backlash from privacy advocates. Per a Friday afternoon report from Reuters, the tech company clarified that it will only utilize its proposed system to look for images that have already "been flagged by clearinghouses in multiple countries."

An initial threshold of 30 images(!) would have to be discovered before the automated scanning system alerted Apple that an actual human should review the issue, though the company explained that the figure would eventually be reduced in the future. Apple also made assurances that its list of image identifiers is universal and will remain constant regardless of the device it is being applied to, which should have Matt Gaetz extremely worried.

As Apple explained during Friday's media call, the company's technical protection is one that creates an encrypted on-device CSAM hash database derived from at least two or more organizations, each operating under the auspices of separate national governments. 

The company, during one of many media-assuaging follow-up meetings this week, declined to comment on whether the negative blowback has had any effect on its position, though it did admit that there was "confusion" surrounding its earlier announcements. Apple did assert that the program was "still in development" and that mulligans like this were a normal part of the production process. 

The practice of scanning user accounts for contraband images is old hat for the tech industry, however Apple's scheme to install the monitoring scheme directly on the device hardware itself is an unprecedented move — one that has privacy advocates up in arms. Basically what's to stop governments from demanding that Apple scour its users' devices for other private, political, religious or personal information once this disingenuous "think of the children" precedent is put into effect?

Sonos has won an early victory in its ongoing legal battle with Google. On Friday, a federal judge with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) made a preliminary decision related to a complaint the company had filed against Google in early 2020, alleging the search giant had infringed on five of its patents. Validating all five claims, the judge said Google should not be allowed to import devices that violate the intellectual property of Sonos.

"Today the ALJ has found all five of Sonos' asserted patents to be valid and that Google infringes on all five patents. We are pleased the ITC has confirmed Google's blatant infringement of Sonos' patented inventions," said Sonos chief legal officer Eddie Lazarus. "This decision re-affirms the strength and breadth of our portfolio, marking a promising milestone in our long-term pursuit to defend our innovation against misappropriation by Big Tech monopolies."

As The New York Times notes, the judge's decision isn't final. The entire ITC body has to make a final ruling before it mandates any remedial measures. With a meeting scheduled for December 13th, that won't happen for another few months.

"We do not use Sonos' technology, and we compete on the quality of our products and the merits of our ideas," said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. "We disagree with this preliminary ruling and will continue to make our case in the upcoming review process."

Sonos first sued Google in early 2020. It accused the company of copying some of the technologies most critical to its speakers, including its Trueplay tuning tool. In patent disputes, companies typically use simultaneous ITC complaints to force the hand of their opponent since the body tends to resolve matters faster than a traditional court. Google subsequently countersued Sonos, claiming the company had been using its search, software, networking and audio processing technologies without paying the proper licensing fees. The feud escalated later that same year when Sonos filed a second suit. 

Out of the box, modern Sonos speakers support Alexa and Google Assistant, and in a roundabout way Siri as well. Between those options, you might think Sonos would be covered when it comes to voice-activated assistants, but the company may be working on a solution of its own. In a customer survey spotted by VoiceBot.ai and later The Verge, Sonos describes a system that would respond to the phrase “Hey Sonos” and allow users to control music playback, search for songs and move tracks between different speakers in their home.

Additionally, the company states the potential voice assistant would process requests locally, claiming that’s something that would allow it work faster. It also points to the privacy benefits of such a setup. “Sonos Voice Control interprets your voice entirely on the speaker, so no audio is sent to the cloud, stored, transcribed, or listened to by anyone,” the company says in the survey. We’ll note here Sonos bought a startup that specialized in fast and private on-device voice processing in 2019.

A Sonos spokesperson told The Verge the company frequently collects feedback from its customers, but that it had no additional information to share. If Sonos plans to release its own voice assistant, it’s not hard to understand its motivations. After spending at least a year to get Assistant on its devices, the company had a very public falling out with Google in 2020, culminating in an ongoing legal spat between the two.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but Twitter has once again temporarily stopped accepting new verification applications from users. This latest pause follows after the company briefly opened the process to the public in May and then subsequently closed it down some eight days later.

At the time, the company said it was doing so because it was “rolling in” verification requests. It took until June for Twitter to sort out the backlog. This time around, the company has a more encouraging excuse. It said it’s taking time to implement tweaks to both the application and review processes, but stopped short of detailing the work it’s doing.

We imagine this latest pause also has something to do with the fact Twitter briefly verified a fake Cormac McCarthy account. Under the company’s public verification rules, an account holder is required to provide evidence like a government-issued ID to prove they’re who they say they are. The holder of the phony McCarthy account apparently didn’t do that.

“For those who have been waiting, we know this may be disappointing,” Twitter said. “We want to get things right, and appreciate your patience.” As before, the company hasn’t said when it plans to start taking applications again. 

It could be months before Boeing takes another stab at a Starliner test flight. The company is detaching the capsule from an Atlas V rocket and taking it back to the factory to fix an issue with four propulsion system valves. The problem led to Boeing scrapping the planned second test flight on August 3rd.

Boeing will conduct "deeper-level troubleshooting" of the valves at its Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center. Engineers attempted to fix the problem while the Starliner was still on top of the rocket — they managed to repair the nine other valves. Boeing, NASA and Atlas V maker United Launch Alliance will need to find a new launch date when Starliner is ready.

However, as SpaceNews notes, the next opportunity for a test flight could be months away. Boeing may have to wait until after the October launches of NASA’s Lucy asteroid mission and SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission, as well as the return of the Crew-2 spacecraft. So, even if Boeing can fix the valves quickly, it could be November before Starliner can get back on the docking port.

AlgorithmWatch, a group of researchers who had been studying how Instagram’s opaque algorithms function, say they were recently forced to halt their work over concerns Facebook planned to take legal action against them. In a post spotted by The Verge, AlgorithmWatch claims the company accused it of breaching Instagram’s terms of service and said it would move to take “more formal engagement” if the project did not “resolve” the issue.

AlgorithmWatch’s research centered around a browser plugin more than 1,500 individuals downloaded. The tool helped the team to collect information it says allowed it to make some inferences about how Instagram prioritizes specific photos and videos over others.

Most notably, the team found the platform encourages people to show skin. Before publishing its findings, AlgorithmWatch said it had reached out to Facebook for comment, only for the company not to respond initially. However, in May 2020, Facebook told the researchers their work was “flawed in a number of ways” after it said earlier in the year it found a list of issues with the methodology AlgorithmWatch had employed.

When Facebook accused AlgorithmWatch of breaching its terms of service, the company pointed to a section of its rules that prohibits automated data collection. It also said the system violated GDPR, the European Union’s data privacy law. “We only collected data related to content that Facebook displayed to the volunteers who installed the add-on,” AlgorithmWatch said. “In other words, users of the plugin [were] only accessing their own feed, and sharing it with us for research purposes.” As for Facebook’s allegations related to GDPR, the group said, “a cursory look at the source code, which we open-sourced, shows that such data was deleted immediately when arriving at our server.”

Despite the belief they had done nothing wrong, the researchers eventually decided to shutter the project. “Ultimately, an organization the size of AlgorithmWatch cannot risk going to court against a company valued at one trillion dollars,” they said.

When Engadget reached out to Facebook for comment on the situation, the company denied it had threatened to sue the researchers. Here’s the full text of what it had to say:

We believe in independent research into our platform and have worked hard to allow many groups to do it, including AlgorithmWatch — but just not at the expense of anyone’s privacy. We had concerns with their practices, which is why we contacted them multiple times so they could come into compliance with our terms and continue their research, as we routinely do with other research groups when we identify similar concerns. We did not threaten to sue them. The signatories of this letter believe in transparency — and so do we. We collaborate with hundreds of research groups to enable the study of important topics, including by providing data sets and access to APIs, and recently published information explaining how our systems work and why you see what you see on our platform. We intend to keep working with independent researchers, but in ways that don’t put people’s data or privacy at risk.

This episode with AlgorithmWatch has worrisome parallels with actions Facebook took earlier in the month against a project called NYU Ad Observatory, which had been studying how political advertisers target their ads. Facebook has some tools in place to assist researchers in their work, but for the most part, its platforms have been a black box since the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That’s a significant problem, as AlgorithmWatch points out.

“Large platforms play an oversized, and largely unknown, role in society, from identity-building to voting choices,” it said. “Only if we understand how our public sphere is influenced by their algorithmic choices, can we take measures towards ensuring they do not undermine individuals’ autonomy, freedom, and the collective good.”

We’ve reached a disquieting point in the COVID-19 pandemic wherein a significant portion of the American public refuses to accept the free and wildly effective vaccines while simultaneously demanding a “return to normalcy” — and all the benefits that reopening the economy would entail. But with the Delta variant’s rapid spread threatening to send the country back into another round of social isolation, state and local governments (and numerous businesses) are seeking to strike a balance between the public’s health and the nation’s economic needs through the use of digital vaccine cards, aka “vaccine passports.” But, unlike the mRNA vaccine itself, these passports are not quite the magic bullets against COVID we had hoped.

Vaccine passports, either physical or digital records certifying that a person has been fully vaccinated against a disease, have been around since the 19th century. As early as the 1880s, students and educators in the US were required to show proof of immunization against smallpox before attending classes. In 1897 Russian scientist Waldemar Haffkine developed a vaccine against the bubonic plague. His breakthrough treatment was immediately put to use by the British colonizers of India. To help ensure that densely populated Hindu and Muslim pilgrimage sites in the country did not mutate into outbreak clusters of the disease, the local government began requiring proof of vaccination by every pilgrim before entering these sites.

With the rise of air travel in the second half of the 20th century, the United Nations adopted similar rules in 1951 and then again in 1969, dubbed the International Health Regulations. These regulations, along with widespread outbreaks of yellow fever, led to the advent of “yellow cards,” which international travellers have carried for decades to certify their immunization against a wide variety of infectious diseases.

Yellow fever is currently the only disease currently on the IHR for which countries can demand vaccination proof as a condition of entering the country, though the UN’s regulations on any disease are advisory and non-binding in nature so the responsibility for adhering to and implementing those rules falls to individual nations.

In response to the COVID pandemic, many nations already have embraced a new generation of vaccine passports. Israel has the Green Pass, Denmark has the Coronapas, the European Union (but not the UK) offers the EU Digital Covid Certificate, China rolled out its vaccine passport as a WeChat mini app in March, and Estonia uses VaccineGuard. Even private businesses are considering implementing their own systems. United, JetBlue and Lufthansa, for example, are rolling out CommonPass, a system designed to verify an international passenger’s COVID testing and vaccination status.

“This is likely to be a new normal need that we’re going to have to deal with to control and contain this pandemic,” Dr. Brad Perkins, chief medical officer at the Commons Project Foundation, the nonprofit that developed CommonPass, told The New York Times in December.

The Biden administration has made clear that it does not support the creation of a vaccine passport program at the Federal level. The President did, however, issue an executive order in January directing the State Department to work with the WHO and international aviation and travel agencies to develop standards for post-pandemic travel.

“The federal government is working on this issue of vaccine credentialing or vaccine verification or what some people call vaccine passports. So we’re going to be following carefully what the federal government comes out with,” Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health, told the SF Chronicle in April. “If they don’t move fast enough, we will come out with technical standards of what we expect and also really focusing on making sure that that privacy is protected and that equity is protected.”

Instead, Americans are offers a hodgepodge of local and state regulations, at least those states that haven't banned certification systems — looking at you, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, and Indiana — despite clear legal precedent affirming the government’s authority to temporarily abridge certain individual rights during a public health crisis (see: Jacobson v. Massachusetts).

Take California, for example. The Golden State recently rolled out the Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record, a system that securely pulls the data stored in the California immunization registry. It’s the same state-collected vaccination data that is seen on the paper cards issued when you got your shots — specifically your name, date of birth, vaccination dates, and vaccine manufacturer.

“It’s not a passport. It’s not a requirement. It’s just the ability now to have an electronic version of that paper version,” California Governor Gavin Newsom explained during a press conference announcing the system’s rollout in June.

The system can also store a scannable QR code on your mobile device so that businesses and venues that do require certification of full vaccination prior to entry can do so easily. The QR code is built on the non-profit SMART Health Card technology, which means that only SMART-compatible scanners can actually read the codes. And in San Francisco, that’s literally all of them. This is a built-in security feature ensuring that some random clown at the bar can’t surreptitiously scan your code using the generic QR reader on their phone and get access to your information.

However, the system’s rollout has not been without its hiccups. This reporter specifically has spent the past six weeks attempting to resolve an issue with incomplete vaccination data being reported to the registry. (Basically, it reads that my second dose is the only dose I received.) The CDPH declined to comment on how many Californians have registered for the service and how many of those registrants have run into similar problems, though the agency has set up a virtual agent to help guide users through the process of alerting the state to any mistakes or omissions.

New York, on the other hand, has not one but two competing vaccine verification systems, neither of which has proven particularly reliable, trustworthy or useful. At the state level, you’ve got the Excelsior Pass, which operates in a similar fashion to California’s DCVR system — pulling immunization data directly from the state’s registry — and leverages IBM’s proprietary blockchain technology to maintain data security and user privacy. At the local level, New York City has rolled out a passport app of its own, dubbed the NYC COVID Safe App, which for all intents and purposes is a half-assed image storage app that is ridiculously easy to spoof.

As you can see from the above tweet, STOP founder and NYC-based privacy advocate Albert Fox Cahn was able to get the NYC app to accept a picture of the iconic rodent in lieu of his actual state-issued vaccination card.

"I uploaded a photo of Mickey Mouse when I registered for it and then it gave me a pop up box saying are you affirming this is accurate," Cahn told WNYC earlier this month. "You click yes. And then you're done."

This feat was easily replicated by other users, including San Francisco-based journalist Cyrus Farivar, who used the menu from a local BBQ joint as his photo.

“The NYC COVID Safe App was designed with privacy at the top of mind, and allows someone to digitally store their CDC card and identification,” Laura Feyer, spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio, told Gothamist in response to these reports. “Someone checking vaccination cards at the door to a restaurant or venue would see that those examples are not proper vaccine cards and act accordingly.”

“The functionality of this app really raises the question, why did the city create it to begin with, because like so many other vaccinated New Yorkers, I had a photo album with my vaccine card months ago,” Cahn told Engadget. “It's unclear how this was anything more than a publicity stunt to roll it out as a new city app.”

“And then on top of that, to then make these broad sweeping statements that how the app is unhackable and to also say that there's no privacy impact when the app is also collecting your IP address and record of every time it's open,” he continued. “It's not a huge amount of IP information but it's information that the city was never collecting before, it's information that they simply don't need.”

What’s more, the NYC COVID Safe app’s lackisadical security also makes it prone to exploitation by anti-vaxxers, like noted area conspiracy theorist, Joe Rogan. Since the app doesn’t independently verify any of the information it is displaying, instead relying on bar, venue and restaurant staffers to make the determination as to whether a photo is legitimate or not, malicious users could easily upload a photo of any vaccine card — whether it’s been photoshopped, acquired from a friend or bought on on the black market (for $400).

The state-run Excelsior Pass has run into privacy issues of its own. For one, its reliance on IBM’s blackbox blockchain system provides virtually no accountability or transparency in how the system actually operates.

The “thing is highly engineered, it has all these layers of registration, verification, and a customized QR code,” Cahn said. “That's raising far more important privacy issues because the state is quite clear that it doesn't use location services. But since each scanner is registered to a specific business address, every time you scan that QR code, the state and IBM are collecting a record of where you were and when, and we haven't done any clear information on how long that data is retained.”

What’s more, an experiment conducted in April by Cahn found that even with the blockchain assurances, the app was remarkably easy to hack. “After getting consent from an Excelsior Pass user, I tried to download their pass, logging into their account using nothing more than public information from social media. Eleven minutes after he gave me the greenlight, I had a copy of his blue Excelsior Pass in hand, valid for use until September,” Cahn wrote for the Daily Beast.

“This city app really just speaks to the dysfunction. Here in New York, the rivalry between the city and state, the fact that we have a mayor and the governor who can't stand each other, and it is not addressing a technical need,” he lamented. “These apps are such a debacle that we just need to go back to old-fashioned paper records.”