Kind of with the slight difference that Apple and Google will integrate this on a system level instead of integrating contact tracing on an app level as it happens with PEPP-PT.
As far as I understand it from this XDA-Post (https://www.xda-developers.com/google-apple-contact-tracing-coronavirus/), the Contact Tracing and BLE Contact Detection API will be delivered over Google Play Services updates. So after my understanding, the AOSP code won’t get modified and therefore there should be no effects on devices without Google Play services.
However, I’m not sure how this interacts with MicroG. Will they include this in their Play Services reimplementation?
Well that happens outside of any software level so there’s no way you can prevent that except by turning off your phone / enabling airplane mode.
The german Telekom also did that. They provided the national institute for infectious diseases with anonymized location data of their users (it’s another discussion wether that’s legitimate or not). I think the data was mainly gained through radio cells.
After my understanding, as long as the API is not implemented in AOSP, the only way to get on user’s devices is over microG / Play Services. So can one say that this can’t directly be controlled by the /e/-devs but rather by the microG-devs?
Generally that’s a good thing to do - no doubts about that.
But I’m not sure if one can be sure that no tracking happens with the new API even if the bluetooth functionality is disabled. It totally depends on how the API will actually be implemented.
That’s the problem with moving such an API to OS-level. The user can still of course disable bluetooth on the phone but this does not guarantee that this also disables bluetooth for contact tracing.
For example, if you have bluetooth disabled but your location services run on “high accuracy”, your phone still uses bluetooth in the background to ping nearby devices.
»This does not stop even after I have deactivated the Bluetooth function. In order for Bluetooth to be completely paused, you have to set it separately elsewhere.«