Exposure Notification
Exposure Notification
[Cueball standing, holding out his chiming smartphone to review alerts it has received.] Alert 1:43 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:38 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:36 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:31 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID.
[Caption below the panel:] No one likes my new COVID exposure notification app.

This comic is another in a series of comics related to the COVID-19 pandemic .
During the coronavirus pandemic, many apps were developed to implement digital contact tracing , using proximity detection or location tracking to notify people who had been potentially exposed to COVID-19. People who know they are infected are encouraged to isolate, and it takes time to test and find out if somebody is infected; so most notifications are retrospective, telling the user about past potential exposures.
In this comic, a different type of app has been developed. Instead of notifying someone if they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, the app produces notifications if they have been exposed to someone who has not tested positive. (Perhaps it also notifies the user if they have been exposed to a person who has tested positive, but if this is the case, it hasn't happened to the user in question yet.) This is much less useful because most people one would typically encounter would either not be infected, or not be aware of their infection, so almost every interaction will generate a notification, annoying the user.  Also, being exposed to someone who has not tested positive is not good news, because it is still possible that the person might have COVID-19; it is simply less bad than being exposed to someone who has tested positive, but still worse than not being exposed to anyone.
Socially and psychologically, modest amounts of people being close to each other normally is a positive behavior.  For a typical person, it could be considered a sad sign of our times if you needed an app to tell you whether you did right in social interactions and compliment you. (For socially awkward people , on the other hand, this could be a welcome development.)
In the title text, Randall decides to give in to users requests, and add a mode giving the bad news that you have been exposed to COVID-19.  Calling this dark mode is a play on dark referring to less desirable, as well as dark mode, a common user interface option. Dark mode is a common feature in apps which allows users the options to have a user interface that gives off less light. Alternatively, it may just be that the developer is completely misunderstanding the user's actual needs. This would be consistent with creating an app that alerts the way this one did in the first place.
Randall has published similar "useless useful apps" in 937: TornadoGuard (a tornado-alert app that has lots of great features, except it doesn't actually alert the user about tornadoes) and 2236: Is it Christmas? (a web page that correctly identifies most days as "not Christmas", but then fails to identify Christmas Day as Christmas, for a >99% "accuracy").
A week after this comic was posted, a user of the Canadian COVID tracing app posted an article about a similar issue: notifications from non exposure .
[Cueball standing, holding out his chiming smartphone to review alerts it has received.] Alert 1:43 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:38 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:36 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID. Alert 1:31 PM Good news: You recently had close contact with someone who has not tested positive for COVID.
[Caption below the panel:] No one likes my new COVID exposure notification app.
