> It is one thing to agree on a few best practices for contact tracing and force app providers to adhere to those standards. It is quite another to bake that standard into the operating system layer, active in the background, ready to be deployed. We have to trust Apple and Google to diligently perform this strict vetting of apps, to resist any coercion by governments
There are countless attacks on Bluetooth. GPS is not accurate enough for contact tracing. The data will not be reliable.
Imagine the lawsuits when dozens of people are required to mandatory quarantine away from home when someone (who they may not know) tests positive?
> then there’s the question of how to keep people who test positive isolated so that they don’t transmit the coronavirus. Some people will have room to isolate at home. But others who share bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, or who live with someone at increased risk for a severe case of COVID-19, will be given some options. The Baker administration is looking at setting up isolation units in dormitories and hotels. People in isolation will need food delivery, possibly child care and lots of additional help so that they don’t interact with others.
Don't most homes share kitchens? Where are the dual-kitchen homes and apartments? This means virtually everyone who was within six feet of a positive contact would be isolated away from their home/family. So that can't scale, because there aren't enough quarantine hotels/dorms to house the entire population.
Every other pandemic in the history of pandemics focused on isolating high-risk groups. That is more practical than Tracing Theatre.
Even Singapore, a virtual police state, barely got 20% of people to use contact tracing apps.
As a silver lining, if Apple/Google surrender location privacy on their platforms, it might finally give Purism and the other "libre" phones a chance in the marketplace. And those $1000 flagship "mobile" phones can be replaced by a $300 iPad without a GPS.
As for the "kids" who "don't care" about privacy? Ask them that question after their first unnecessary 2 week quarantine-in-isolation-hotel due to glitchy bluetooth.
> As for the "kids" who "don't care" about privacy? Ask them that question after their first unnecessary 2 week quarantine-in-isolation-hotel due to glitchy bluetooth.
People don’t revolt against the tyranny of the state just because it starts affecting their peers. Western democracies all over the world lock up thousands of innocent people every year. It happens all the time, it could happen to you, me, or anybody reading this comment. Very few people care. If it did happen to you, and you wanted to complain about it, you’re unlikely to convince many additional people to care.
No revolt needed. Economic natural selection will run its course. States can make their own choices. Talent can do the same. This does assume that states will compete to attract the top tier of creative professionals who can work from home, create high-value digital businesses with remote workers and an industrial tax base.
Unless there are walls between states, top talent can and will move.
This assumes that people will proactively leave, instead of just not caring, until such a point in time when it may be too late for them personally. It also kinda assumes that even if people were to leave, that the state would realize the error of its ways. Which is quite optimistic, because there’s many cases where it’s rather easy to measure the negative impact of a policy, and then watch the policy makers use those negative impacts as a basis for further negative-impacting policy. It also seems this advice would really only help people who had the economic freedom to arbitrarily choose where they live and work.
The virus has shown that a relatively small number of humans wielding incorrect models (disproven in mere weeks!) were able to influence the leaders of hundreds of millions of people.
After the first human ran a four-minute mile, that feat was repeated by other humans. Don't underestimate the lessons learned by the non-winners of the last two months.
More than a few HN readers could work from home and people in some states are about to make very different choices from their neighbors in other states. Time will tell who wins. If you listen to the rhetoric, it is claimed that some will literally die because of the policy choices of their governor.
It is true that past behavior does not support the migration theory, but the near future does not (sadly) look much like the past.
> As a silver lining, if Apple/Google surrender location privacy on their platforms, it might finally give Purism and the other "libre" phones a chance in the marketplace. And those $1000 flagship "mobile" phones can be replaced by a $300 iPad without a GPS.
There has been speculation that if some European countries make a contact-tracing app obligatory for everyone or for some subset of people, saying “My phone doesn’t run Android apps” will be no excuse. If you don't have a smartphone that can run the required app, then you will be given a Bluetooth fob instead and told to carry that around.
> In what might be one of the most over-the-top and draconian responses to coronavirus yet seen in Montana, Valley County is mandating that people wear government-issued pink arm bands in under to purchase products inside of stores. The measure, enforced by the Valley County Health Department, insists that store-owners keep customers out unless they have the pink arm-bands, which denote the customer has been in the area more than 14 days and submitted to quarantine protocol.
It has been several weeks now since I read the article that I had in mind, but I have found this other article[0] on the use of wristbands to enforce quarantines, and towards the end it mentions the possibility of wristbands for contact tracing that I posted about above. It is easy to assume that if such tech exists, then governments will expect you to use it if you are one of those weirdos like us (or very elderly) who don't have an Apple or Android smartphone.
SmartFence! It could zap the wearer when they get within 6 feet 6 inches of another human. That ensures no crossing of the six foot boundary and cuts down on expensive quarantines and contact tracing. Also teaches obedience and deters shoplifting.
> “Some people are completely opposed to an intrusion on privacy but there’s a younger generation sharing their location on dozens of apps,” Burgum said.
Funny, when you tell young people that by the time they leave the food court, descend the escalator and exit the mall, 100 companies know what, where and when they bought dinner, they stop using digital payments.
But do they also turn off their phones while shopping? Just kidding, that would be an absurd overreaction. Surely they at least do the responsible thing and turn off Bluetooth and WiFi? No?
If the kids are alright, it’s in an ignorance is bliss kinda way.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, retailers sell their purchases info to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. who can then combine your email inbox and browing history with your purchase data.
We’re part of some Google Business listing navigation program or AdWords conversion tracking program at work. We applied and got a postcard with a two-factor code in our business mailbox. We validated our address in this way. Later we received what appears to be either a Bluvison (now HID) BVBLN5W-IDT or BVBI45W-IDT. The former does BLE beacon functions and motion detection. The latter does even more:
Motion, Light, Vibration (3-axis, up to 800 hz), Magnetometer, Temperature -13° to +149° F (-25° to +65° C)
I’m guessing for the Google program we are part of, we got the BVBLN5W-IDT. It’s available for $31.20 USD in quantities of 20 or less direct from the vendor HID, “for demo purposes only,” of course. Here’s some info I found about it and the Google programs.
Google can't imprison me, Google can't take my rights away, Google can't force me to flee the country.
By equating the rights of the US Gov with the rights of a Corp. your are creating a dangerous narrative.
The state is the entity we should all be warning about. Corporations on the other hand are innocent little puppies compared with the power of the US Gov.
I know my phone and location is tracked heavily for advertising and such. If I care to be anonymous I leave phone home and carry cash. Even then there are cameras everywhere.
So i expect this location data likely tracked either way, so might as well go to help the greater good.
While I'm generally one to rail against this kind of tracking, you're right. There are so many entities already getting our precise location data, would it be so bad if we add one more that will actually save lives instead of just selling us useless shit?
Sigh. This is exactly the attitude that leads to the erosion of civil liberties.‘
2010: "It's just a private company doing it for advertising, why not?"
2020: "Eh, private companies are already doing it, might as well let government have access for contact tracing, just temporarily."
2022: "The government has had access to my location data for the past 2 years, nothing bad has happened to me yet, and they say it's necessary to continue fighting future outbreaks. Might as well keep giving them access".
A roundabout solution might be to only allow people out of quarantine if they have an acceptable contact tracing solution so that if they become infected they can notify others - and - others can notify them. Then see how supply and demand work that out ... (although it would, of course, take too long).
If the draft can exist, so can contract-tracing, it's a matter of context and proportionality. Right now the greater good favours contact tracing though probably not after the pandemic dies down.
It's absurd to think the ACLU is 'totally cool' with forcing an entire nation to stay in their homes, or wear masks, but 'livid' about contract tracing.
I can understand why you might immediately think that because we are so concerned about 'privacy' these days, but just consider what is going on for a moment.
'Stay at home' -> OK
'You must wear a mask in public' -> OK
'Contact tracing' -> Controversy!
No, the fact we are in a la-la land existential crisis changes everything.
If universal contact-tracing is a viable solution to get things moving, then it's exceedingly rational to require it.
And without a vaccine, it's absolutely viable - we know this because it works in S. Korea.
Everyone gest the app, or something approximating it, testing should be relatively widespread and effectively focused on 'contacts' - and we can keep Covid at bay so long as we follow the rules and a bunch of other precautions are taken.
I can hardly believe HN-ers who've been on lockdown for a month haven't dug into how successful countries are dealing with this.
'Contract tracing' and essentially 'contact testing' are the tools that winning countries are using.
In Taiwan, they basically abolished Covid, there are so few cases, they have a handle on all of them.
More generally Korea, where the disease is 'out there' but more minimally, they use the strategy more agressively.
Yes - it's possible for people who are 'pre-symptomatic' to spread the disease, but we're not sure of those parameters yet, and now symptomatic they are.
If people who have any flu or Corona-like symptoms isolate themselves immediately, and then go for a test - this is a good starting point. If they test positive, then the 'contact tracing' can identify other people who need to have precautionary testing or isolation.
Korea has been doing this to great effects.
Everyone is clamouring on about their 'freedoms' while locked at home - when they could be out and about using a contact tracing strategy as in Korea.
The US would have to get down to a smaller number of cases first, but it's absolutely a 'get the economy going' strategy, we know it works because we have the Korean example.
Not only do we know it works, it's the only example of a strategy that enables freedom of mobility and relative association while 'living with' the Coronva virus.
For me, your points do not answer the previous post.
For a common discussion ground, it maybe helps to give links to the following articles, which describe the asymptomatic transmission, and the airflow transmission.
It doesn't matter if we know precisely the details of Covid spread.
Obviously that information would help.
Irrespective of how Covid spreads - we know for sure that:
a) Total lockdown works.
b) Contact tracing works.
c) If you have 0 cases and you have good borders (like Taiwan), you can keep it out.
d) Nothing else works.
Option B is our only way to stay alive.
Those 'superspreader' references you pointed out will help us refine the terms of 'contact tracing' solution, but probably not abnegate it entirely.
I think it is pretty dangerous to tell the entire population that their choices are either to install an app which tracks their movement, or essentially be under house arrest. Even outside of the privacy issues, some people just don't have the capabilities to do that, my grandmother is never going to figure out how to work a phone, or get set up and monitor a contact tracing app. Maybe we could provide a free alternative that protects your privacy, eg. wearing a mask whenever you are in public.
Just 'wearing masks in public' is obviously not a solution or else we'd be doing it, or someone else would and we'd have evidence that it works, but just the opposite.
Without a vaccine, our options are extremely limited.
'Universal Contact Tracing' with testing follow up is employed in Korea and it's the only solution that has been shown to work (other than total eradication like Taiwan, but you need very strong borders for that).
So 'right now' if we had our act together, we could probably start to loosen up, so long as we had contact tracing - and teams ready to follow up on those 'positive tested' so that their contacts can be traced etc..
Just like with everything, there are winners and losers.
It wouldn't cost much to get granny a SIM+cheap mobile, and let her know all she has to do is 'keep it on' for her own safety. She can do that with some help.
Somehow Korean Grannies are able to cope (are they magic?) because their country is operational, people are out and about and their economy is functioning at the same time that they keep Coronavirus at bay.
Meanwhile HN-ers in an uproar over the government 'possibly knowing their location' (but probably not really) literally as they are hunkered down at home, the most severe form of de-facto emergency law in the nation history ...
The Koreans have effectively managed Coronavirus and their government isn't going to throw them all in jail any time soon, it's entirely reasonable and rational to have a tracking policy in place that's proportional and effective.
Pretty much every freedom you give to people will cause more deaths, and that was true before COVID-19. You could make the same argument you are making now to justify requiring everyone to be tracked during a regular flu season - flu deaths are certainly lower, but still in the tens of thousands and could be reduced with contact tracing. Personally I think there is almost no scenario in which it is OK to deny people access to things like grocery stores, or not allow them to see their family living elsewhere, because they don't have a tracking device on their person. It certainly has a cost, but so does things like end to end encryption, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, etc.
Consider that this radically new environment requires a totally different social calculus.
>>>>>>>>> You are denied access to your family right now i.e. 'civil liberties' are already exceedingly curtailed.
How are all these arguments against 'contact tracing' holding up against the fact you are literally, right now, practically locked in your home.
In most places if you see your family right now you can be fined. There are police out there right now checking to make sure you either going to the grocery store or some other important thing.
Right now you are living under the most serious curtailment of civil liberties in American history. So why are you not screaming against it?
The reason is that here on HN people care about 'government information'. It's a 'hot button issue' so people react with concern.
>>>>>>>> You could make the same argument you are making now to justify requiring everyone to be tracked during a regular flu season.
No, absolutely not!
The 'flu' is not existentially destructive to civilization, it's not requiring you to be locked in your home right now.
COVID is pandemic, which we have 'controlled' by locking down in our homes. Obviously, this cannot last, so we need a 'solution' to get going.
Masks are not enough and neither will be general social distancing. Absent a vaccine there are only 2 proven solutions:
1) Eradication (like Taiwan) where nobody but incoming people might have it, and they keep a very close eye on people coming in.
2) Contact Tracing (like Korea). People can generally move freely, but they have to have contact tracing and if the gov. requires them to get a test, or requires them to show their 'social contact history' they have to.
These are the only solution that has proven to work.
The 'lifting' of social measures over the next few months is in the US is going to be very dangerous because COVID will just come right back again.
The US economy is like an airplane without an engine heading straight for the ground, like a person who's heart has been stopped. It's going to come apart at the seams unless something can be done.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The Choice
So the choice is:
1) Open up and have the pandemic come back
2) Stay in your home, the economy tailspins, it falls apart, the country falls apart
3) Vaccine
4) An aggressive social policy that works, the only one on the table seems to be Korea.
Obviously there are problems with 'social tracing' and government involvement, but in light of the existential problem we face, they are small.
I won't bet on that for more than a few people. What if they live in a country mandating an app like that to be able to get out of home? And even if that's going to be voluntary, I don't expect many people to move to another state or country or be jobless for more time because of privacy concerns. I mean, they'll be concerned but they'll still install the app when they have to.
Americans have the option of filing lawsuits. The US attorney general said that the federal government may join lawsuits filed by businesses against states, for constitutional issues.
It's not about "privacy" or an "app". It's about core principles upon which countries and states were founded. These principles and laws are not optional. History has many lessons for those who surrender principles. People lost their jobs and much much more.
As an american that has avoided jobs, people and now living abroad, I'm willing to subvert, corrupt, and exploit technology by these tech companies against their own employees, owners, useds and teach others around me how to go about doing it if got out of hand (which I think it will eventually). This might diverge from the current tech group think zigiest, and I'm ok with that, because I think these tools should ultimately empower everyone to be able to work together if they chose to do so and accept the fact that some people may not, as apposed to levered by the few against the masses.
Because of the asymmetric reach of tech, I think the few like me, have an advantage that most aren't willing to explore the ramifications of.
Testing for criminality by proxy of narcotic abuse, at the start of employment, would sound odd if it didn’t so obviously resemble a power play.
I’ve never had one though: what’s the positive story for having urine testing at work?
Jobs where you need a real test for criminality (e.g. working with children) outsource crime detection to the government of course. FBI Criminal Justice Information Service et al.
Fork lift drivers (even the electric ones \wink) get breathalyzed before a shift.
Those seem like the grown up, non-theatre approaches.
I could imagine a situation where some private events or businesses require you to have a contact tracing app installed in order to go inside. Not sure if that would neccesarily be a good thing (we certainly wouldn't want essential businesses having that requirement), but it could be a reasonable requirement for things like music festivals or something.
Yeah, the end of this article made me realize that the people pushing this stuff are going to do it via social pressure around "non-essential" activity - i.e. so, you want to go to a nightclub, but you're not willing to sacrifice a little bit of privacy for the greater good?
The mobilization (you could say weaponization) of social pressure campaigns has been, by far, the most impressive thing I’ve observed throughout this entire saga.
I don’t mean “impressive” in a good way, but that’s in the eye of the beholder.
Have you seen "Turn" on Netflix? There was a similar civil-war dynamic in that series as social pressure was mobilized, dividing friends and families. If this keeps up, it could trigger economic migration.
Sweden shows a very similar curve to places that shutdown. Some of their rates are higher as expected, since they are time-shifting contagion. But neither their healthcare nor economy has been devastated to the extent of neighbors.
The volume and velocity of opportunism in this crisis has been a sight to behold. It will take years to catalog what happened and develop a societal immune system to the large-scale manipulation of entire populations with dubious models and data.
We're taking an approach that empowers individuals to take their data out of big tech companies and contribute it directly to their local healthcare providers and public health agencies: https://www.covidcontacttracing.com/.
This approach is highly practical -- the penetration (location history in Android, Google Maps) is already there, and we've already built out a set of tools around it to deliver insights to first-responders, epidemiologists and doctors, while ensuring individual privacy.
I think the only way to do effective contact tracing while respecting individual privacy and agency is to put the user in control of the data, and make sure that any data transfer is done with consent and deliberation.
,,the only way to do effective contact tracing while respecting individual privacy and agency''
The problem is that the government wants to achieve just the opposite. They see the current crisis as a way to extend their power over people, and intend to do that as much as they can get away with.
Right now, everyone in public health is 100% focused on solutions that can deliver results. If we can demonstrate effectiveness with a system that is privacy-first, it'll be all the more difficult to push a system that's collecting data just for the sake of it.
"They see the current crisis as a way to extend their power over people, and intend to do that as much as they can get away with."
Where is your evidence for this?
While it's always a risk, I see people trying to mitigate a crisis the likes of which none of us have ever seen.
There are literally billions of people locked in their homes and there is no feasible plan to get out. 'Contact tracing' Korea style is the only proven option on the table.
There's no reason to believe reasonable operational elements can't be put in place.
> Contact tracing' Korea style is the only proven option on the table.
That only works if, like Korea and Taiwan, it is done from
the beginning.
We now know that the virus was in the US and moving through the population since Feb and Jan, i.e. the US has inadvertently been on the "herd immunity" path.
It is also the case that the US is geographically diverse with very different infection patterns across regions and clusters. Hence the federal plan is for states to make local decisions.
I'm from a country that just made dictatorship official (Hungary), took away most money from the opposition, raided hundreds of big companies with the Hungarian military while keeping the companies secret, distributed more PPE outside the country than inside for us.
In US the states are fighting for getting PPE for the doctors (fighting over millions of dollars), while the FED increased the balance sheet by more than 70% (trillions of dollars) to prop up big zombie companies that were already highly overvalued, bailed out Blackrock investments instead of paying salaries for people who they want to stay home.
I'm right now in France, where people are getting their paychecks every month normally, just not from their employer, but the government.
Regarding south Korea, I read an earlier interview where he doesn't understand why the western world doesn't use masks (basically he called us stupid, just didn't say the word).
Masks were working 100 years ago, and everybody had one, I just don't believe that the government couldn't have ramped up production if they really wanted instead of just thinking of their investments potentially losing value.
+ Hungary is obviously problematic but most Western countries are not relevant.
+ Your comment about US PPE is completely wrong: the issue is not a lack of money, it's the scarcity of the resource.
+ France is teetering on real bankruptcy, and will have vicious unemployment, low wages and not a lot of opportunity while the US will rebound quite well (inequality notwithstanding). PS I lived in France as well. Their socialised medical program is obviously good, but France is broken and poor. I now live in Montreal where there are tons of French citizens flooding in looking for jobs.
+ The masks issue may or may not be relevant - it's certainly not the primary factor. Absolutely without question the aggressive contact-tracing/testing done by the South Korea teams is 'the gold star' in terms of Covid response.
Contact-tracing is the only known solution to the problem and frankly it work well, people have to work together.
As for Hungary ... there are 20 other problems you get to before the problem of 'the government has my location'. First - the government already knows where you already knows where you are if you're there -> you're at home! Second - you need a functional and intelligent governmental apparatus to do the 'contact tracing' system. Lots of people, lots of procedures. Hungary probably doesn't have the capability. FYI they probably don't have the capability to do a whole lot with location data anyhow.
> FYI they probably don't have the capability to do a whole lot with location data anyhow.
I thought before that Hungary won't be able to implement a survaillance state that fast, because the government doesn't have any IT capability, but what's happening is even scarier: they started outsourcing it to Chinese companies, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that trend continuing.
I believe that Palantir is behind China in surveillence software (especially gathering data about people from public cameras, but of course using GPS data is much easier.
Of course the funniest thing is that the name of the surveillence software is SkyNet, because the CEO of the company loves Terminator.
> FYI they probably don't have the capability to do a whole lot with location data anyhow.
The only “capability” required is the ability to pay a Palantir invoice and ship data to them.
The UK is another good example of a western country which has attempted to use the COVID-19 crisis to extend government power - it is naive _in the extreme_ to believe that every other western government is not doing the same when this behaviour has not been demonstrated in the past 20 years.
It is naive _in the extreme_ to sit locked in one's home, in the greatest curtailment of civil liberties in human history, while the economy is a patient with heart failure, about to die, with the largest bailouts (Trillions!!) in history and then only enough to hold on for a 'few more weeks' - and then have as a 'primary concern' some, specific umbrage with the privacy of data by some gov agency, which is secondary in the first place because it has nothing to do with contact tracing, probably would be illegal for the gov. to use it, and even if they did, it probably won't cause any short term harm.
It's completely irrational to the point wherein the issue of interest really boils down to how people could have such a perspective in the first place.
Though there are 'concerns' obviously, and certainly 'some' impropriety will take place, and 'some' government will behave poorly, it's conspiratorial _in the extreme_ to suggest that 'every other government' is going to turn their country into China and to illegally and inappropriately just turn their countries into Big Brother.
The 'game has changed' - fundamentally and existentially.
For the next few years at least, there is a completely different context for everything. Everything.
People are going to have to adjust their thinking.
Seems like all I read about on hacker news is big techs negative effect on society. When did this website become so negative about all this? The google bashing was one thing, but now it’s all surveillance and censorship. Where’s the startup talk? Programming language talk? Open source code?
This is one of the great parts of America, personal liberties. But simultaneously one of the downsides of the individual > whole scheme, sometimes sacrifices hurt the individual but are good for the whole.
Quite the conundrum, once you go down the whole > individual route, where do you stop?
The Constitution actually has a framework for this. For individual liberties, any limits must pass “strict scrutiny”. Warrants must not be general, but must be particular in the persons and places to be searched.
So in short, IANAL, but I doubt the government could ever require such an app be built. However, there’s nothing short of market forces stopping the major tech companies from building the dragnet and deploying it in an OS update to billions of devices completely voluntarily.
...Unless, perhaps, there’s a privacy or data protection framework that might happen to apply but which doesn’t get immediately waived for this application?
If market forces demand some sort of contact tracing application, but it largely violates Constitutional ethos, can the “business” be declared Unconstitutional? Is that even in the purview of the Constitution? I wouldn’t imagine so, but I’m just musing on the topic. When our foundational ethic runs in direct conflict with our economic ethic, which takes priority?
> can the “business” be declared Unconstitutional?
Strictly speaking the business would be criminal (like a protection racket or slave market), but noone ever enforces that, so it's a bit of moot point.
I'd say that in practice, economic "ethic" would win, and that's because it's a bit of a blind spot in the discussion about freedoms: technically, all involved choices are voluntary, as the economic gun pressed to your temple is considered out of scope.
There are many Constitutional rights that require us to let a pandemic burn. For example free association, free assembly, free movement across state borders, due process for imprisonment. But "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" [0].
And for what? Bluetooth does not help to sufficiently trace airflow. It doesn’t recognize walls. The data will be highly unreliable.
Nonetheless, people will be forced to use it because social and work pressure let’s them do so.
Infections will rise again though because people and politicians assume it is safe enough.
So it’s only use is for the Big Brother watching you.
If Apple and Google can’t manage to keep their platform privacy conscious, this may even set an the end to the smartphone era. An old Nokia is waiting in the drawer already.
Are there any studies, or even computer models, which attempt to estimate the efficacy of contact tracing in a pandemic which already has double-digit prevalence?
> Some public health leaders and infectious disease doctors are questioning the timing of this launch. Galea said contact tracing is usually more effective at the beginning of an epidemic, before a disease like the coronavirus has spread.
> “I don’t know that it’s too late, it’s certainly late,” he says. “Had we had the tests and were we organized enough to do contact tracing right up front, it would have potentially taken us down a very different path in this epidemic.”
While we roll out the red carpet for the most invasive dragnet ever created, do we have any scientific reason to think it will be effective?
> If true, COVID19 has much more spread and much lower fatality.
So we have consistent data showing that the risk is much lower. Could we update our now-incorrect models that were used to justify contact tracing and Palantir social network analysis?
If we don't trust these expensive studies that all point in the same direction, why should we trust Bluetooth? If we don't trust the tests used in the above studies, how can we use those exact tests to forcibly quarantine not only the people who "test positive" but their entire Palantir contact chain?
It would be helpful if we can pick one mathematical dystopia and stick with it. The math-rhetoric dissonance is deafening.
As Naval said, if the studies are wrong, they are all wrong in the same direction.
A good use of contact tracing would be to point Palantir at the social graphs on each "side" defending or attacking specific virus studies, looking for correlations with industry and other ties. Would be a fun project for social network analysts.
My understanding of the proposal was that no third party including Google and Apple could access any real information from this. It honestly seemed like privacy was the primary consideration in the design. I realize that's a losing perception battle to fight.
If anything, the approach has prioritized privacy to such a degree that it probably won't be very helpful. The design seems to require a very high rate of adoption to be useful, and that probably isn't going to happen unless it is opt out, which seems unlikely to be the case.
I assume these are going to be branded as completely voluntary. Like, completely voluntary until you want to have health insurance, buy a flight ticket or maybe be employed in certain/most industries. In those cases someone is going to tell you that, you must to be running the app or whatever tool is invented to track your contacts.
I'll be honest, this virus situation has me super scared. Governments everywhere are giving themselves powers they should not have, and I doubt they are going to relinquish them once this blows over. Police are acting gestapo-ish in a lot of places. Meanwhile, Big Tech are developing even creepier ways to track everyone while pretending to save the world.
In fact, every time some tech company involves themselves with this covid situation, it rubs me completely the wrong way. Apple, just go back to making overpriced computers. Twitter, Facebook and Google wants to have the final say of what is and isn't the ultimate truth, like the goddamn thought police. On the whole, people are capable of sniffing out bullshit for themselves, and if they're not, Facebook can't save them from themselves, and convince them that 5G does not cause bat flu. Just stay out of it, and let the medical professionals sort out this mess.
I think the world has broken, and it won't go together again properly.
I actually ran across a YouTube comment the other day that was claiming the bar that comes up below any covid related video was part of their attempts to suppress the truth. I know that poe's law says it might have been sarcasm, but somehow I don't think any of the actions the big tech companies have taken have really done all that much to stop these beliefs.
It might be somewhat the opposite; the classic conspiracy theory meme is that the powers that be are suppressing the truth. It has been well publicised that these sites are cracking down on what these people believe to be the truth, which could easily be taken as evidence that they hold the correct view.
I wish I had some sort of idea of how to prevent this, but as I see it these sorts of actions are possibly worse than doing nothing. The only positive thing I've noticed recently is that YouTube has somewhat mitigated the recommendation algorithm pushing ever-more extreme polarizing content.
Technically speaking, calculating how much taxpayers owe to the US Federal government involves "completely voluntary" actions [0]. A very humorous legal turn of phrase, someone was having a lot of fun when that slipped into the language of the law.
Remember when the CIA did fake swab tests in Pakistan to promote vaccinations, but it was just a smokescreen to catch Osama Bin Laden? Yeah, no... I’m not trusting PRISM Partners to enable this on any of my devices
Not commenting on the underlying issue, but regarding the comparison, it's a little bit unreasonable to think they're trying to pull the same thing here.
Cause data has never leaked from cloud server storage rented by individuals or companies before… oh, wait… (but trust him, it’s just him and a buddy who have access, what could possibly go wrong).
The C virus is as severe as a severe flu. It makes no sense to turn devices into surveillance devices a little bit / a lot / completely. Google and Apple will also lose trust if they do it.
Edit: The C virus is a deadly disease and the flu is a deadly disease. Google and Apple must be sure that it's useful to have this tracking in this situation. If it was not useful in this situation the 2 companies would lose trust. From [1], which is a good article again and again because it demands decisions based on data:
If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.
I agree 100% with the Alphabet/Apple approach. There's no additional absolute location tracking. But it's easy to get the contact histories for all those infected.
If health authorities want to identify infection hotspots, they can request location histories from infected people and their contacts. That's no more than health authorities have requested in the past. It's just easier to produce, and more accurate.
For me, my argument is this: yes the contact tracing apps could infringe on my privacy rights as an individual. But app could be effective in notifying potential exposed individuals. If that individual knows this information, he/she can take the right action to protect him/herself and his/her family. Thus the app protects people's right to live and right to good health. I know people always talk about right to free speech and movement etc, but I believe right to live is another human right, in fact, its the most important human right. Rights to free speech is useless if you are dead. Second, when the virus is not growing exponentially, this contact tracing capability would allows us to quickly stop emerging outbreaks, then we can feel comfortable to stop stay at home orders and open up the economy. Therefore, the app also protects right to movement.
So its a trade off, would you want to trade privacy rights to right to live and right to move? For me, it is yes.
In addition, we know that we can reduce the risk of privacy infringement by designing the system properly, as they are doing it here. We could also use block chain technology to implement the database so that no central authority can know which exact individual has been to where. The database could also not store personally identifiable information. We could use cryptographic computing techniques so that no one, not even the software engineers working the project can know which person has been to where.
I know people are scared about the potential privacy infringement here. But if we don't try to come up with effective ways to stop the spread of the virus, there are people dying due to getting sick. And there are families who could not feed themselves because we shut down the economy.
It's more like which type of freedom do you want...right now we're anything but free. I mean you can freely move about w/ a privacy sucking app, or you can stay home in quarantine indefinitely but keep your privacy - but we know where you're at - you're at home, duh.
They need to tie these w/ an UBI at least then people are getting something for their privacy unlike FB which basically steals your data and sells it.
I'd rather let people follow the social distancing policy and stop this mental gymnastics about the necessity of tracking. P.S. I'm in the US, so I can actually freely move now.
This is feature creep, now instead of knowing who has been close to infected people, they ‘need’ to know who has been close to whom and where many people have been close to each other.
Hardly surprising governments can’t stop talking about this once in a lifetime opportunity of peeking inside everyones private lives. Surely this information would never become available to secret services..
The long term ramifications scare me. Even if you use rolling ID's as suggested, someone with enough data points could infer identity from the patterns.
This might be more palatable if it were approached in an "old school" fashion. Start by clarifying your customer is not any public health authority; it's individual users. I could walk around with a notebook and keep track of everyone I interact with - even if some strangers aren't recorded by name (e.g. Cashier working aisle 6 at 3pm on Thursday). Design the app to mimic that task and make it easier for me.
I keep sovereignty over my records. If some agency wants them, they have to request them through me. Bake in meaningful, plausible deniability so I can simply say "sorry, I don't have any" if I don't like the name of the agency.
Better yet, use encryption such that both parties need to consent before any particular contact link can be inferred.
Make it so secure that you could broadcast the scrambled bits on a blockchain which any user can view through the lens of their private keys to check if they might have had contact. In a sense, this problem shares some characteristics with zero-knowledge proofs or anonymized financial transactions (all I need to know is I might have been exposed; not any details of how Covid found its way to me). Consider lessons learned hardening against crypto tracing efforts.
If people feel it's safe, effective and anonymous, enough may even opt-in organically of their own accord.
98 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] thread> It is one thing to agree on a few best practices for contact tracing and force app providers to adhere to those standards. It is quite another to bake that standard into the operating system layer, active in the background, ready to be deployed. We have to trust Apple and Google to diligently perform this strict vetting of apps, to resist any coercion by governments
There are countless attacks on Bluetooth. GPS is not accurate enough for contact tracing. The data will not be reliable.
Imagine the lawsuits when dozens of people are required to mandatory quarantine away from home when someone (who they may not know) tests positive?
Proposal for MA use of contact tracing data (MIT is in MA and they have contributed to protocol design), https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/contact-tracing...
> then there’s the question of how to keep people who test positive isolated so that they don’t transmit the coronavirus. Some people will have room to isolate at home. But others who share bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, or who live with someone at increased risk for a severe case of COVID-19, will be given some options. The Baker administration is looking at setting up isolation units in dormitories and hotels. People in isolation will need food delivery, possibly child care and lots of additional help so that they don’t interact with others.
Don't most homes share kitchens? Where are the dual-kitchen homes and apartments? This means virtually everyone who was within six feet of a positive contact would be isolated away from their home/family. So that can't scale, because there aren't enough quarantine hotels/dorms to house the entire population.
Every other pandemic in the history of pandemics focused on isolating high-risk groups. That is more practical than Tracing Theatre.
As a silver lining, if Apple/Google surrender location privacy on their platforms, it might finally give Purism and the other "libre" phones a chance in the marketplace. And those $1000 flagship "mobile" phones can be replaced by a $300 iPad without a GPS.
As for the "kids" who "don't care" about privacy? Ask them that question after their first unnecessary 2 week quarantine-in-isolation-hotel due to glitchy bluetooth.
People don’t revolt against the tyranny of the state just because it starts affecting their peers. Western democracies all over the world lock up thousands of innocent people every year. It happens all the time, it could happen to you, me, or anybody reading this comment. Very few people care. If it did happen to you, and you wanted to complain about it, you’re unlikely to convince many additional people to care.
Unless there are walls between states, top talent can and will move.
After the first human ran a four-minute mile, that feat was repeated by other humans. Don't underestimate the lessons learned by the non-winners of the last two months.
More than a few HN readers could work from home and people in some states are about to make very different choices from their neighbors in other states. Time will tell who wins. If you listen to the rhetoric, it is claimed that some will literally die because of the policy choices of their governor.
It is true that past behavior does not support the migration theory, but the near future does not (sadly) look much like the past.
There has been speculation that if some European countries make a contact-tracing app obligatory for everyone or for some subset of people, saying “My phone doesn’t run Android apps” will be no excuse. If you don't have a smartphone that can run the required app, then you will be given a Bluetooth fob instead and told to carry that around.
https://montanadailygazette.com/2020/04/14/montana-county-de...
> In what might be one of the most over-the-top and draconian responses to coronavirus yet seen in Montana, Valley County is mandating that people wear government-issued pink arm bands in under to purchase products inside of stores. The measure, enforced by the Valley County Health Department, insists that store-owners keep customers out unless they have the pink arm-bands, which denote the customer has been in the area more than 14 days and submitted to quarantine protocol.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52409893
Funny, when you tell young people that by the time they leave the food court, descend the escalator and exit the mall, 100 companies know what, where and when they bought dinner, they stop using digital payments.
If the kids are alright, it’s in an ignorance is bliss kinda way.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, retailers sell their purchases info to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. who can then combine your email inbox and browing history with your purchase data.
About as "1984" as you can get.
Motion, Light, Vibration (3-axis, up to 800 hz), Magnetometer, Temperature -13° to +149° F (-25° to +65° C)
I’m guessing for the Google program we are part of, we got the BVBLN5W-IDT. It’s available for $31.20 USD in quantities of 20 or less direct from the vendor HID, “for demo purposes only,” of course. Here’s some info I found about it and the Google programs.
FCC info
https://fcc.io/SL6-BEEKSIBEEK
Datasheet
https://www.hidglobal.com/sites/default/files/resource_files...
Google Project Beacon info related to the My Business program
https://developers.google.com/beacons/place-visits
Google My Business program beacon setup guide
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7577917?hl=en
A video that goes over the pack-in documents and the beacon and what it does
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tm2Qr0e_JV8
Who made the beacon we got
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161201005500/en/HID...
this if false when it comes to Gmail. they do not check your emails.
Google can't imprison me, Google can't take my rights away, Google can't force me to flee the country.
By equating the rights of the US Gov with the rights of a Corp. your are creating a dangerous narrative.
The state is the entity we should all be warning about. Corporations on the other hand are innocent little puppies compared with the power of the US Gov.
the US Gov can literally kill you and walk away.
So i expect this location data likely tracked either way, so might as well go to help the greater good.
2010: "It's just a private company doing it for advertising, why not?"
2020: "Eh, private companies are already doing it, might as well let government have access for contact tracing, just temporarily."
2022: "The government has had access to my location data for the past 2 years, nothing bad has happened to me yet, and they say it's necessary to continue fighting future outbreaks. Might as well keep giving them access".
If the draft can exist, so can contract-tracing, it's a matter of context and proportionality. Right now the greater good favours contact tracing though probably not after the pandemic dies down.
I can understand why you might immediately think that because we are so concerned about 'privacy' these days, but just consider what is going on for a moment.
'Stay at home' -> OK 'You must wear a mask in public' -> OK 'Contact tracing' -> Controversy!
No, the fact we are in a la-la land existential crisis changes everything.
If universal contact-tracing is a viable solution to get things moving, then it's exceedingly rational to require it.
And without a vaccine, it's absolutely viable - we know this because it works in S. Korea.
Everyone gest the app, or something approximating it, testing should be relatively widespread and effectively focused on 'contacts' - and we can keep Covid at bay so long as we follow the rules and a bunch of other precautions are taken.
It's been demonstrated to work.
Don’t forget that the airflow provides a major infection vector, which can’t be traced via Bluetooth or location.
How does contact tracing help?
'Contract tracing' and essentially 'contact testing' are the tools that winning countries are using.
In Taiwan, they basically abolished Covid, there are so few cases, they have a handle on all of them.
More generally Korea, where the disease is 'out there' but more minimally, they use the strategy more agressively.
Yes - it's possible for people who are 'pre-symptomatic' to spread the disease, but we're not sure of those parameters yet, and now symptomatic they are.
If people who have any flu or Corona-like symptoms isolate themselves immediately, and then go for a test - this is a good starting point. If they test positive, then the 'contact tracing' can identify other people who need to have precautionary testing or isolation.
Korea has been doing this to great effects.
Everyone is clamouring on about their 'freedoms' while locked at home - when they could be out and about using a contact tracing strategy as in Korea.
The US would have to get down to a smaller number of cases first, but it's absolutely a 'get the economy going' strategy, we know it works because we have the Korean example.
Not only do we know it works, it's the only example of a strategy that enables freedom of mobility and relative association while 'living with' the Coronva virus.
For a common discussion ground, it maybe helps to give links to the following articles, which describe the asymptomatic transmission, and the airflow transmission.
"Asymptomatic transmission, Achilles’ heel of current strategies to control Covid" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22971691
"Covid-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955779
Obviously that information would help.
Irrespective of how Covid spreads - we know for sure that:
a) Total lockdown works. b) Contact tracing works. c) If you have 0 cases and you have good borders (like Taiwan), you can keep it out. d) Nothing else works.
Option B is our only way to stay alive.
Those 'superspreader' references you pointed out will help us refine the terms of 'contact tracing' solution, but probably not abnegate it entirely.
Just 'wearing masks in public' is obviously not a solution or else we'd be doing it, or someone else would and we'd have evidence that it works, but just the opposite.
Without a vaccine, our options are extremely limited.
'Universal Contact Tracing' with testing follow up is employed in Korea and it's the only solution that has been shown to work (other than total eradication like Taiwan, but you need very strong borders for that).
So 'right now' if we had our act together, we could probably start to loosen up, so long as we had contact tracing - and teams ready to follow up on those 'positive tested' so that their contacts can be traced etc..
Just like with everything, there are winners and losers.
It wouldn't cost much to get granny a SIM+cheap mobile, and let her know all she has to do is 'keep it on' for her own safety. She can do that with some help.
Meanwhile HN-ers in an uproar over the government 'possibly knowing their location' (but probably not really) literally as they are hunkered down at home, the most severe form of de-facto emergency law in the nation history ...
The Koreans have effectively managed Coronavirus and their government isn't going to throw them all in jail any time soon, it's entirely reasonable and rational to have a tracking policy in place that's proportional and effective.
Consider that this radically new environment requires a totally different social calculus.
>>>>>>>>> You are denied access to your family right now i.e. 'civil liberties' are already exceedingly curtailed.
How are all these arguments against 'contact tracing' holding up against the fact you are literally, right now, practically locked in your home.
In most places if you see your family right now you can be fined. There are police out there right now checking to make sure you either going to the grocery store or some other important thing.
Right now you are living under the most serious curtailment of civil liberties in American history. So why are you not screaming against it?
The reason is that here on HN people care about 'government information'. It's a 'hot button issue' so people react with concern.
>>>>>>>> You could make the same argument you are making now to justify requiring everyone to be tracked during a regular flu season.
No, absolutely not!
The 'flu' is not existentially destructive to civilization, it's not requiring you to be locked in your home right now.
COVID is pandemic, which we have 'controlled' by locking down in our homes. Obviously, this cannot last, so we need a 'solution' to get going.
Masks are not enough and neither will be general social distancing. Absent a vaccine there are only 2 proven solutions:
1) Eradication (like Taiwan) where nobody but incoming people might have it, and they keep a very close eye on people coming in.
2) Contact Tracing (like Korea). People can generally move freely, but they have to have contact tracing and if the gov. requires them to get a test, or requires them to show their 'social contact history' they have to.
These are the only solution that has proven to work.
The 'lifting' of social measures over the next few months is in the US is going to be very dangerous because COVID will just come right back again.
The US economy is like an airplane without an engine heading straight for the ground, like a person who's heart has been stopped. It's going to come apart at the seams unless something can be done.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The Choice
So the choice is:
1) Open up and have the pandemic come back 2) Stay in your home, the economy tailspins, it falls apart, the country falls apart 3) Vaccine 4) An aggressive social policy that works, the only one on the table seems to be Korea.
Obviously there are problems with 'social tracing' and government involvement, but in light of the existential problem we face, they are small.
Does anyone think that’s actually realistic? I’m not optimistic.
It's not about "privacy" or an "app". It's about core principles upon which countries and states were founded. These principles and laws are not optional. History has many lessons for those who surrender principles. People lost their jobs and much much more.
Because of the asymmetric reach of tech, I think the few like me, have an advantage that most aren't willing to explore the ramifications of.
"Freedom ain't free, especially 'round my way"
I’ve never had one though: what’s the positive story for having urine testing at work?
Jobs where you need a real test for criminality (e.g. working with children) outsource crime detection to the government of course. FBI Criminal Justice Information Service et al.
Fork lift drivers (even the electric ones \wink) get breathalyzed before a shift.
Those seem like the grown up, non-theatre approaches.
I don’t mean “impressive” in a good way, but that’s in the eye of the beholder.
Sweden shows a very similar curve to places that shutdown. Some of their rates are higher as expected, since they are time-shifting contagion. But neither their healthcare nor economy has been devastated to the extent of neighbors.
The volume and velocity of opportunism in this crisis has been a sight to behold. It will take years to catalog what happened and develop a societal immune system to the large-scale manipulation of entire populations with dubious models and data.
This approach is highly practical -- the penetration (location history in Android, Google Maps) is already there, and we've already built out a set of tools around it to deliver insights to first-responders, epidemiologists and doctors, while ensuring individual privacy.
I think the only way to do effective contact tracing while respecting individual privacy and agency is to put the user in control of the data, and make sure that any data transfer is done with consent and deliberation.
The problem is that the government wants to achieve just the opposite. They see the current crisis as a way to extend their power over people, and intend to do that as much as they can get away with.
Right now, everyone in public health is 100% focused on solutions that can deliver results. If we can demonstrate effectiveness with a system that is privacy-first, it'll be all the more difficult to push a system that's collecting data just for the sake of it.
Where is your evidence for this?
While it's always a risk, I see people trying to mitigate a crisis the likes of which none of us have ever seen.
There are literally billions of people locked in their homes and there is no feasible plan to get out. 'Contact tracing' Korea style is the only proven option on the table.
There's no reason to believe reasonable operational elements can't be put in place.
That only works if, like Korea and Taiwan, it is done from the beginning.
We now know that the virus was in the US and moving through the population since Feb and Jan, i.e. the US has inadvertently been on the "herd immunity" path.
It is also the case that the US is geographically diverse with very different infection patterns across regions and clusters. Hence the federal plan is for states to make local decisions.
In US the states are fighting for getting PPE for the doctors (fighting over millions of dollars), while the FED increased the balance sheet by more than 70% (trillions of dollars) to prop up big zombie companies that were already highly overvalued, bailed out Blackrock investments instead of paying salaries for people who they want to stay home.
I'm right now in France, where people are getting their paychecks every month normally, just not from their employer, but the government.
Regarding south Korea, I read an earlier interview where he doesn't understand why the western world doesn't use masks (basically he called us stupid, just didn't say the word).
Masks were working 100 years ago, and everybody had one, I just don't believe that the government couldn't have ramped up production if they really wanted instead of just thinking of their investments potentially losing value.
+ Your comment about US PPE is completely wrong: the issue is not a lack of money, it's the scarcity of the resource.
+ France is teetering on real bankruptcy, and will have vicious unemployment, low wages and not a lot of opportunity while the US will rebound quite well (inequality notwithstanding). PS I lived in France as well. Their socialised medical program is obviously good, but France is broken and poor. I now live in Montreal where there are tons of French citizens flooding in looking for jobs.
+ The masks issue may or may not be relevant - it's certainly not the primary factor. Absolutely without question the aggressive contact-tracing/testing done by the South Korea teams is 'the gold star' in terms of Covid response.
Contact-tracing is the only known solution to the problem and frankly it work well, people have to work together.
As for Hungary ... there are 20 other problems you get to before the problem of 'the government has my location'. First - the government already knows where you already knows where you are if you're there -> you're at home! Second - you need a functional and intelligent governmental apparatus to do the 'contact tracing' system. Lots of people, lots of procedures. Hungary probably doesn't have the capability. FYI they probably don't have the capability to do a whole lot with location data anyhow.
I thought before that Hungary won't be able to implement a survaillance state that fast, because the government doesn't have any IT capability, but what's happening is even scarier: they started outsourcing it to Chinese companies, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that trend continuing.
Of course the funniest thing is that the name of the surveillence software is SkyNet, because the CEO of the company loves Terminator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLo3e1Pak-Y
The only “capability” required is the ability to pay a Palantir invoice and ship data to them.
The UK is another good example of a western country which has attempted to use the COVID-19 crisis to extend government power - it is naive _in the extreme_ to believe that every other western government is not doing the same when this behaviour has not been demonstrated in the past 20 years.
It's completely irrational to the point wherein the issue of interest really boils down to how people could have such a perspective in the first place.
Though there are 'concerns' obviously, and certainly 'some' impropriety will take place, and 'some' government will behave poorly, it's conspiratorial _in the extreme_ to suggest that 'every other government' is going to turn their country into China and to illegally and inappropriately just turn their countries into Big Brother.
The 'game has changed' - fundamentally and existentially.
For the next few years at least, there is a completely different context for everything. Everything.
People are going to have to adjust their thinking.
Quite the conundrum, once you go down the whole > individual route, where do you stop?
So in short, IANAL, but I doubt the government could ever require such an app be built. However, there’s nothing short of market forces stopping the major tech companies from building the dragnet and deploying it in an OS update to billions of devices completely voluntarily.
...Unless, perhaps, there’s a privacy or data protection framework that might happen to apply but which doesn’t get immediately waived for this application?
Strictly speaking the business would be criminal (like a protection racket or slave market), but noone ever enforces that, so it's a bit of moot point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
Nonetheless, people will be forced to use it because social and work pressure let’s them do so.
Infections will rise again though because people and politicians assume it is safe enough.
So it’s only use is for the Big Brother watching you.
If Apple and Google can’t manage to keep their platform privacy conscious, this may even set an the end to the smartphone era. An old Nokia is waiting in the drawer already.
> Some public health leaders and infectious disease doctors are questioning the timing of this launch. Galea said contact tracing is usually more effective at the beginning of an epidemic, before a disease like the coronavirus has spread.
> “I don’t know that it’s too late, it’s certainly late,” he says. “Had we had the tests and were we organized enough to do contact tracing right up front, it would have potentially taken us down a very different path in this epidemic.”
While we roll out the red carpet for the most invasive dragnet ever created, do we have any scientific reason to think it will be effective?
> Recent serology studies may be wrong. But if wrong, they‘re all wrong _in the same direction_.
> If true, COVID19 has much more spread and much lower fatality.So we have consistent data showing that the risk is much lower. Could we update our now-incorrect models that were used to justify contact tracing and Palantir social network analysis?
If we don't trust these expensive studies that all point in the same direction, why should we trust Bluetooth? If we don't trust the tests used in the above studies, how can we use those exact tests to forcibly quarantine not only the people who "test positive" but their entire Palantir contact chain?
It would be helpful if we can pick one mathematical dystopia and stick with it. The math-rhetoric dissonance is deafening.
A good use of contact tracing would be to point Palantir at the social graphs on each "side" defending or attacking specific virus studies, looking for correlations with industry and other ties. Would be a fun project for social network analysts.
In fact, every time some tech company involves themselves with this covid situation, it rubs me completely the wrong way. Apple, just go back to making overpriced computers. Twitter, Facebook and Google wants to have the final say of what is and isn't the ultimate truth, like the goddamn thought police. On the whole, people are capable of sniffing out bullshit for themselves, and if they're not, Facebook can't save them from themselves, and convince them that 5G does not cause bat flu. Just stay out of it, and let the medical professionals sort out this mess.
I think the world has broken, and it won't go together again properly.
It might be somewhat the opposite; the classic conspiracy theory meme is that the powers that be are suppressing the truth. It has been well publicised that these sites are cracking down on what these people believe to be the truth, which could easily be taken as evidence that they hold the correct view.
I wish I had some sort of idea of how to prevent this, but as I see it these sorts of actions are possibly worse than doing nothing. The only positive thing I've noticed recently is that YouTube has somewhat mitigated the recommendation algorithm pushing ever-more extreme polarizing content.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-income-tax-voluntary/
Edit: The C virus is a deadly disease and the flu is a deadly disease. Google and Apple must be sure that it's useful to have this tracking in this situation. If it was not useful in this situation the 2 companies would lose trust. From [1], which is a good article again and again because it demands decisions based on data:
If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
Sorry, not good enough.
There are privacy-preserving cryptographic solutions to contract tracing. Anything less is unacceptable.
If health authorities want to identify infection hotspots, they can request location histories from infected people and their contacts. That's no more than health authorities have requested in the past. It's just easier to produce, and more accurate.
So its a trade off, would you want to trade privacy rights to right to live and right to move? For me, it is yes.
In addition, we know that we can reduce the risk of privacy infringement by designing the system properly, as they are doing it here. We could also use block chain technology to implement the database so that no central authority can know which exact individual has been to where. The database could also not store personally identifiable information. We could use cryptographic computing techniques so that no one, not even the software engineers working the project can know which person has been to where.
I know people are scared about the potential privacy infringement here. But if we don't try to come up with effective ways to stop the spread of the virus, there are people dying due to getting sick. And there are families who could not feed themselves because we shut down the economy.
They need to tie these w/ an UBI at least then people are getting something for their privacy unlike FB which basically steals your data and sells it.
Hardly surprising governments can’t stop talking about this once in a lifetime opportunity of peeking inside everyones private lives. Surely this information would never become available to secret services..
This might be more palatable if it were approached in an "old school" fashion. Start by clarifying your customer is not any public health authority; it's individual users. I could walk around with a notebook and keep track of everyone I interact with - even if some strangers aren't recorded by name (e.g. Cashier working aisle 6 at 3pm on Thursday). Design the app to mimic that task and make it easier for me.
I keep sovereignty over my records. If some agency wants them, they have to request them through me. Bake in meaningful, plausible deniability so I can simply say "sorry, I don't have any" if I don't like the name of the agency.
Better yet, use encryption such that both parties need to consent before any particular contact link can be inferred.
Make it so secure that you could broadcast the scrambled bits on a blockchain which any user can view through the lens of their private keys to check if they might have had contact. In a sense, this problem shares some characteristics with zero-knowledge proofs or anonymized financial transactions (all I need to know is I might have been exposed; not any details of how Covid found its way to me). Consider lessons learned hardening against crypto tracing efforts.
If people feel it's safe, effective and anonymous, enough may even opt-in organically of their own accord.