Many residents of San Francisco Bay Arena felt an earthquake alert of 4.8 magnitude on Tuesday. However, what caught the attention and created some social media buzz, was that many users received the alert even before the area they were in was hit by tremors and shakes from seismic waves.
The mobile alert about the earthquake which buzzed California was from an app called ShakeAlert, which has been developed by Google. Sundar Pichai was among thousands of other Android phone users who received the alert before the area was hit by tremors. He even shared a screenshot of the Android alert on Twitter and wrote, “The alert came just before, felt like a long one, hope everyone is ok.”
Notably, the app does not predict natural disasters, instead it analyses data provided by state government agencies and third parties. Tectonic waves in the earth’s crust are always in motion and when they collide, they generate seismic waves. The sensors up by the agencies record the data and send them to cause damage, the ShakeAlert system reads the information and then sends a notification to alert people.
Interestingly, what happens with these apps is that they can record the information and then transmit it to other nearby locations at the speed of light, which is faster than the speed at which seismic waves travel. The result is that often people get an earthquake alert seconds, in some cases even minutes, before the ground beneath their feet actually gets tremors.
Meanwhile, in a separate development, the fines imposed by Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Google for abusing its dominance in the online markets may not impact the tech major ’s near-term prospects, considering that three-fourths of its overall revenue in India comes from cloud and IT infrastructure services, and from digital advertising.
On 20 October, the anticompetitive watchdog imposed a fine of ₹1,337.6 crore on Google, accusing it of abusing its dominant position in the market for Android devices through pre-installed apps and services. Five days later, CII imposed another penalty of ₹936 crore, stating that the company was involved in anticompetitive activities, forcing application developers to either use its own payment tools, or pay a hefty service usage fee to Google even if they paid using other payment methods on Play Store.
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