[avra]

I'm afraid someone has to tell the author that what is already possible is worse than the concerns raised here. This technology is actually an effort to not use the available methods that would ignore privacy.

[keanzu]

Working with the [Taiwan's] five major telecoms companies, the system tracks the quarantined individual by triangulating the location of the their phone relative to nearby cell towers. “Each telecom company has a different way of calculating the location of the phone, including how far it is from the cell reception tower and its direction in relation to the tower,” said Jyan Hong-wei, director general of Taiwan’s cybersecurity department. “As long as the phone is turned on, we can figure out the location. And if the phone is turned off, we’ll know that, and we can send a message to front line administrative or police officers so they can follow up.”

https://qz.com/1825997/taiwan-phone-tracking-system-monitors...

Exactly: Pervasive tracking is already available to the telcos and is being used in at least one country.

[stjohnswarts]

The author (and anyone half awake about what their phone is) is well of aware of the technology. Currently there are laws and legal standards that stop a lot of this. This is an attempt to soften up the public to the idea of having every movement, purchase, contact, and interaction go into a database and then passed on to the government when they don't do necessarily what the government wants. In the walled garden of helping with covid there is no doubt that this could do good. Outside those walls are governments hoping such tactics soften up the populace to the idea that this is actually a good idea for everyday life.

[Zenbit_UX]

Indeed, combined with the authors stream of consciousness rant made this an infuriating read. I've met people like this before, usually their paranoia is made worse by their lack of technical knowledge. This also makes them difficult to convince that they are wrong. Since they don't have enough knowledge to tell who is right in a discussion, they often just listen to the loudest voice that is reinforcing their world view.

[nickysielicki]

Ding ding ding. It’s sad how quickly we forget that we live under dragnet digital surveillance. We haven’t even really internalized it.

[cinquemb]

Yet, still there is a conscious effort on the part of these companies/orgs/governments to slang the "we're protecting your privacy™" narrative because it's always easier to these leverage tools against others when they don't see it as a threat and aren't willing to mitigate against it to any degree.

[jka]

That's a useful perspective to be aware of, and if this were a pure susbtitution of one mechanism for another then that could be a clearer win.

I think it's also true that deploying yet another potentially privacy-invading technology makes it more difficult for privacy advocates and lawmakers to deal with and reduce existing overreaches.