It's going to be a problem to get rid of it later .. but right now we can barely go outside! It's not a simple tradeoff between tracking and no tracking, it's a tradeoff between tracking and lockdown.
US deaths just passed 22k, over seven times 9/11 and over four times the total Iraq war death toll. It is likely we will see five to ten times that total number before the pandemic is ended.
People have been happily arguing to let the old die as a means to end the lockdown. How about cellphone tracking instead?
(And remember that every cellphone knows your approximate location by necessity of which cell you're connected to.)
Framing this as an either/or choice (surrender some privacy or the elderly die) is a reductio ad absurdum.
There are easier and less blatantly intrusive ways of achieving 80% or 90% of the mitigation, like for example a combination of nonstop education of the public and issuing tickets for breaking social distancing rules as is being done in some places.
After the 9/11 attacks, Americans passively accepted huge intrusions on privacy that have still not been rolled back, 19 years later.
We should be very careful what we wish for. This tracking thing is a very slippery slope.
I don’t understand why we go through all this trouble? If we’re talking about Apple and Google they already have all information about where the majority of people have been (everyone that didn’t explicitly turn off their location tracking services).
It also doesn’t require anyone to install an app...
Maybe the world is more then the USA, so if in country X a doctor finds a person with something and he wants to warn all the people this person had contact with, this doctor would have to ask nicely Google and Apple to grep trough logs and find who meet who and where? Would Google and Apple respond to a doctor in a small country?
You can have a national app that is under the control of the health department and doctors ,t hat only does things like "send a notification to all users that were in contact with person with this ID to come to hospital and get a test".
I understand that this could be potentially abused for evil or that evil people already do this using WiFi or cell towers, I am thinking that we should also think at the good that could come of this.
No they don’t. Nobody has data that granular and fit for purpose.
If my purpose-built wirst watch shows me veering dozens of meters of course even if I explicitly tell it to precisely track my location then that’s not fit for purpose.
Won't this cause false positives from people, for example, walking in front of my house while I'm inside, and also while for example, stopped at a stoplight next to other cars?
Privacy issues aside, if the 10 minute key is only 16bits, and this is being used by hundreds of millions of people, wouldn't there be a lot of false positives?
The size of the graph doesn't matter, only the average vertex degree, which should be pretty low if you are social distant, because you only share identifiers with nearby people.
Voluntary compliance for public health today; mandatory compliance by government edict tomorrow -- or we flag your account and you're prohibited from buying anything. And what if I chose to stop using a smart phone and just use a flip phone that doesn't have Bluetooth? Am I a de facto enemy of public health (or just public enemy)?
Anyone else see this as a MASSIVE slippery slope with too much potential for exploitation?
"Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy. It's right there alongside "appeal to authority" and "confirmation bias", to name two examples people somehow tend to remember far easier. It's a fallacy because it applies to everything: "Now, they're just requiring cars to emit less CO2[0]. Next, they'll prohibit breathing!"
This program goes out of its way to achieve provable anonymity. That is, in fact, the only reason Google and Apple are needs to implement this. Google Maps has actual location data, with similar precision at least in cities. That data has been there for sliding/skating governments to grab for years now. It's on servers, where it's easier to get to than data on your phone, legally. And location data is far more valuable than "X and Y came within 5 minutes at least once in the three days beginning April 15th".
If all that doesn't convince, rest assured it will convince the public. As would anything, really, because they already see this pretty clearly. With that in mind, consider that going to the barricades for privacy now means certain failure on this issue, and possibly lasting repetitional damage for the cause.
In the US at least, I think you just argued exactly how the slippery slope isn't a slippery slope. The US government is never going to spring for getting every American a smartphone.
The tl;dr is that at least in the context of a pandemic like this one, lack of access to a smartphone and lack of willingness to enable tracking puts a person in the new second-class-citizen category. It's not the stick that government would use to restrict freedom; it's the carrot of granting more freedom to those who are more trusting of authority.
Not only do I personally not see much of a way around that scenario, the Vox article notes it's entirely possible that Americans' general mistrust of authority means the country may recover more slowly and painfully than nations that are willing to let the government data-tag and monitor everyone.
At what point does the value of participating in society and the economy outweigh the value of one's privacy? It seems this question is going to rapidly become even more non-academic than it already is.
I wouldn't think it is excessive - if you're cycling and pass someone then the contact period would be very brief (but if you're passing through their sneeze cloud then it could be critical).
Not a dupe. This article explains in detail how the contact tracing API can work while preserving privacy.
Random identifiers not linked to you or your device, identifiers change every 10 minutes so third parties can't track you over time, processing locally on the device instead of by Apple or Google or the government, etc.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
US deaths just passed 22k, over seven times 9/11 and over four times the total Iraq war death toll. It is likely we will see five to ten times that total number before the pandemic is ended.
People have been happily arguing to let the old die as a means to end the lockdown. How about cellphone tracking instead?
(And remember that every cellphone knows your approximate location by necessity of which cell you're connected to.)
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|6 years ago|reply
There are easier and less blatantly intrusive ways of achieving 80% or 90% of the mitigation, like for example a combination of nonstop education of the public and issuing tickets for breaking social distancing rules as is being done in some places.
After the 9/11 attacks, Americans passively accepted huge intrusions on privacy that have still not been rolled back, 19 years later.
We should be very careful what we wish for. This tracking thing is a very slippery slope.
[+] [-] dasKrokodil|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
[+] [-] tsherr|6 years ago|reply
I knew crap like this was going to happen. Hello Big Brother.
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|6 years ago|reply
Nothing. Except a slightly elevated chance of getting infected.
Remember: The goal is not to (make your Grandmother) die for your cause, but to make the virus die for their ill-calibrated conspiracy theory.
[+] [-] alanbernstein|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|6 years ago|reply
It also doesn’t require anyone to install an app...
[+] [-] simion314|6 years ago|reply
You can have a national app that is under the control of the health department and doctors ,t hat only does things like "send a notification to all users that were in contact with person with this ID to come to hospital and get a test".
I understand that this could be potentially abused for evil or that evil people already do this using WiFi or cell towers, I am thinking that we should also think at the good that could come of this.
[+] [-] arrrg|6 years ago|reply
If my purpose-built wirst watch shows me veering dozens of meters of course even if I explicitly tell it to precisely track my location then that’s not fit for purpose.
[+] [-] panarky|6 years ago|reply
BLE only has a range of 20 meters or so indoors.
[+] [-] alanbernstein|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joncrane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stilley2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nokcha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikece|6 years ago|reply
Anyone else see this as a MASSIVE slippery slope with too much potential for exploitation?
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|6 years ago|reply
This program goes out of its way to achieve provable anonymity. That is, in fact, the only reason Google and Apple are needs to implement this. Google Maps has actual location data, with similar precision at least in cities. That data has been there for sliding/skating governments to grab for years now. It's on servers, where it's easier to get to than data on your phone, legally. And location data is far more valuable than "X and Y came within 5 minutes at least once in the three days beginning April 15th".
If all that doesn't convince, rest assured it will convince the public. As would anything, really, because they already see this pretty clearly. With that in mind, consider that going to the barricades for privacy now means certain failure on this issue, and possibly lasting repetitional damage for the cause.
[0]: One wishes...
[+] [-] cosmodisk|6 years ago|reply
https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/fhkcw8/what_are_...
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DagAgren|6 years ago|reply
If you are going to attack it, you need to actually address what it does and explain why you don't think that is sufficient.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tgv|6 years ago|reply
Also: that central server has got to be pretty powerful.
[+] [-] justzisguyuknow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenheron|6 years ago|reply
Might be possible with iOS devices as it's pretty easy to test each of them. Harder to do with the 1000s of Android devices that exist.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
The tl;dr is that at least in the context of a pandemic like this one, lack of access to a smartphone and lack of willingness to enable tracking puts a person in the new second-class-citizen category. It's not the stick that government would use to restrict freedom; it's the carrot of granting more freedom to those who are more trusting of authority.
Not only do I personally not see much of a way around that scenario, the Vox article notes it's entirely possible that Americans' general mistrust of authority means the country may recover more slowly and painfully than nations that are willing to let the government data-tag and monitor everyone.
At what point does the value of participating in society and the economy outweigh the value of one's privacy? It seems this question is going to rapidly become even more non-academic than it already is.
[+] [-] transfire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djaychela|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merricksb|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834959 (805 points, 459 comments)
[+] [-] panarky|6 years ago|reply
Random identifiers not linked to you or your device, identifiers change every 10 minutes so third parties can't track you over time, processing locally on the device instead of by Apple or Google or the government, etc.
[+] [-] RestAndVest|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]