On September 1, Apple and Google unveiled a jointly developed Exposure Notifications Express tool forcreating digital contact-tracing applications for use on cellphones. The tool runs on their respective operating systems, used by roughly three billion worldwide. But this wasn’t the first collaboration between the two erstwhile competitors to help COVID-19 mitigation efforts. In April, the companies had introduced an opt-in framework so that each participating jurisdiction, whether a country, state or city, could build individual coronavirus exposure notification apps. In the U.S., each state was tasked with deciding whether to use the platform and then to individually create their own app. Nearly five months later, only seven U.S. states and only a few individual countries, such as Ireland, Switzerland and Singapore, have launched apps. In conversations with the technology giants, state-health authorities admitted they were having difficulty building the apps themselves, causing the slow adoption. Thus, this new system requires no outside app to be developed; instead it will be included in the recently released versions of each company’s operating systems. The opt-in system has a central server, operated by the Association of Public Health Laboratories, rather than separate servers in each state, and it provides the technology for sending and receiving alerts of exposure. In the U.S., states will only need to opt into the newsystem, and the companies claim to use anonymous identifiers to keep track of phones. In the age of a deadly global pandemic, traditional aversions to monitoring capabilities based on fears of privacy invasions seem quaint. As we have discovered, the use of digital technologies to track, monitor and surveil global citizens has become more acceptable, with an assumed payback of safety, security and positive citizen welfare. Whether this new tolerance for being surveilled will remain when the pandemic ends is a curious and touchy situation.