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Dominic Preston
Google’s Android early warning system severely underestimated Turkey’s lethal earthquakes.

Android Earthquake Alerts uses the network of smartphones to detect tremors, sending alerts to other phones in the affected area. But in a paper published in Science, the company admitted it had found “several limitations” in the algorithm’s performance during two 2023 quakes that killed over 55,000 people.

It underestimated the 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude quakes, and instead of sending 10 million “TakeAction” alerts, which override Do Not Disturb, it sent just 469.

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