Keep your phone.
Help warn your community.

An earthquake warning can arrive before the shaking, with it, or after. When it comes first, a few seconds are enough to drop under a table, pull a child close, step away from a window or stop on the stairs.

Today, the people around you with iPhones never get that chance: in Colombia their phones have no earthquake warning at all. Your neighbours, your parents, the family upstairs, the people at the bus stop. With your phone in the network, they can.

You won't feel a thing. They might feel the difference.

• No screen

  Nothing to open, nothing to look at.

• No sound

  It never rings, buzzes or vibrates.

• Almost no battery

  A moment every few minutes, and more only when an earthquake alert appears.

It shows nothing and makes no sound. Every few minutes it wakes for a moment to say it is still there, which uses very little battery and data. It does more only when an earthquake alert actually appears.

An Android phone

The one you carry is fine. Android 10 or later, with Google Play services.

Google's alerts on

Earthquake alerts turned on, under Settings, Safety & emergency, Earthquake alerts. They are on by default.

Where you are

Colombia, for now, where iPhones get no earthquake warning of their own.

A connection

Wi-Fi or mobile data, as your phone normally has.

Location

Approximate location, allowed all the time. Precise location is never requested.

Have an old Android in a drawer? Plug it in at home and it covers your neighbourhood around the clock.

It reads only Google Play Services' earthquake alerts: the full-screen alert through Android's accessibility service, and the earthquake notification through notification access. Android lets apps with those permissions see more than that. Magnitude Proxy ignores everything else, and no other screen, app, message or notification leaves your phone.

When it catches an alert, it sends the alert's text and what Android says about the notification, with your phone's location rounded to about a kilometre. Every few minutes it also sends a short heartbeat: that it is running, whether its two permissions are on, the battery level and the same approximate location, so we know where warnings can come from. It also sends a few anonymous setup and reliability counts.

It never sends your exact position, your contacts, your messages or anything that identifies you. The privacy policy lists exactly what our server keeps.

Those two permissions are powerful, because they are the only way an app can see Google's alert. That is why the app explains each one before you turn it on, and why we distribute it ourselves rather than through Google Play, which reserves that use of accessibility for accessibility tools.

Uninstall the app. Our server marks a phone as quiet when its heartbeats stop, and we see that it has gone. If you want its records deleted too, write to us.

Will I notice it?

No. It has no screen you need to open, never makes a sound, and uses about as much battery as checking the time now and then. Your phone keeps working exactly as before.

Do my own alerts change?

No. Your phone keeps showing Google's alerts exactly as before, and it sees them first. Magnitude Proxy only passes them on to others.

Do I need a spare phone?

No. The phone you carry works, and helps wherever you go. An old phone left plugged in at home is a bonus: it covers your neighbourhood around the clock.

Why do you need my location?

A warning is true of the place where it was observed. To send it to the right people, the server has to know roughly where your phone is. It keeps only the latest position, rounded to about a kilometre, never a history.

What happens if a phone sends something false?

Phones join only by invitation, each with its own key that we can revoke, and tests are always marked as tests. Before we open the network more widely we are adding further checks, so that one phone cannot raise a false alarm for a whole area.