Google’s coronavirus testing website arrives – with serious privacy concerns
It wasn’t anything close to the nationwide online coronavirus triage and testing tool that Donald Trump had promised. But on Sunday evening, a website allowing residents of two northern California counties to enter symptoms and, if eligible, make an appointment for coronavirus testing went live.
By Monday morning, however, the project by Verily – a sister company to Google under the corporate umbrella of Alphabet – had reached capacity, and users were informed that no more testing appointments were available.
The site’s modest utility and scope stands in stark contrast in a news conference that Google had 1,700 engineers working on a website that would “be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location”.
