Google’s Android-based earthquake detector had a false alarm

Google has disabled its Android earthquake detection diagnostic successful Brazil aft galore smartphone users successful São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro received mendacious exigency alerts connected Friday morning, Android Police reports. The alerts of a nonexistent 5.5 magnitude earthquake were sent to devices astir 2AM this morning, and pinpointed earthquakes successful the country’s Ubatuba and Baixada Santista regions.

Google launched the earthquake detection web that uses accelerometers successful Android devices arsenic a seismometer successful California successful 2020, and implicit the years, it has expanded to different countries.

According to CNN Brasil, the Civil Defense of São Paulo, which manages an aboriginal informing strategy for catastrophe risk, said it “did not contented immoderate alert and that determination is nary grounds of immoderate occurrence related to the imaginable earthquake successful the state.”

In an email to The Verge, Google spokesperson Ed Fernandez writes:

The Android Earthquake Alerts System is a supplemental work that uses Android phones to rapidly estimation earthquake shaking and supply aboriginal warnings to users. It’s not designed to regenerate immoderate authoritative oregon different nationalist informing systems. On February 14th, our strategy detected signals from devices adjacent the seashore of São Paulo and triggered an earthquake alert to users successful the region. We promptly disabled the alerting strategy successful Brazil and are presently investigating what happened. We apologize to our users for the inconvenience and stay committed to improving our tools.