The Department of Health has disabled exposure notifications on your iPhone. We explain to you exactly what the message means!
Government turns off exposure notifications
Have you recently received a notification on your iPhone from the Ministry of Health? Then you are not alone, because the government has permanently disabled exposure notifications for the coronavirus on your iPhone. These were notifications that your iPhone gave if you had been near someone who was infected with corona.
Also read: Postponement, without adjustment: this is how Apple dealt with the corona crisis
Fortunately, the pandemic is now (almost) over, so it is no longer necessary to keep track of corona infections. The government already stopped using the CoronaMelder app in the spring of 2022. The app has not been used since April 2022, so no anonymous data was collected from you. Now a final notification confirms that no more exposure notifications will be sent on your iPhone.
CoronaMelder has stopped working for a long time
The CoronaMelder app has been live in the Netherlands since October 2020. Special software has been used for the app, because apps are normally not allowed to collect data from surrounding devices in the background. Apple and Google therefore joined forces to tackle this in a privacy-friendly way. For example, you could be warned via the exposure reports on your iPhone if you had been near someone with a positive corona test.
On February 13, 2022 there were almost six million downloads, of which 2.5 million are active users. So there’s a good chance you received the following notification on your iPhone this week: “Your public health agency has disabled exposure notifications.” This is not new, because the government completely stopped using the app in September 2022. Since then you can no longer receive notifications.
Turn off exposure alerts manually on iPhone
Apple sends the latest exposure notification to everyone who still has the CoronaMelder app on their iPhone. Don’t have the app anymore? Then you will no longer receive the latest message. Did you not receive a notification, even though the CoronaMelder app is still on your phone? Then you can disable the exposure notifications (and data collection) as follows:
- Open ‘Settings’ on your iPhone;
- Go to ‘Exposure Notifications’;
- Scroll down and choose ‘Turn off exposure notifications’;
- Finally, tap “Turn off and delete data.”
In addition, you can safely remove the CoronaMelder app from your iPhone, because exposure reports will no longer appear. The government has stopped using the app, so it is no longer useful to leave the CoronaMelder on your phone. That also saves some memory, so that space is freed up for an app that is still in use!
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