See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees.
What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway political opinion, and other less than stellar purposes.
Given the virtually unlimited executive powers the CDC believes it has, I am not sure I agree with your assessment that it is the least scary people. But I agree that the problem here is not that the CDC is buying it so much that this data is available to be bought.
The CDC gave its pronouncements and state and local governments acted as they saw fit. They were a glorified informational pamphlet. They exercised virtually no real power whatsoever - that was mostly governors and mayors. I'm constantly bewildered when people try to paint a toothless bureaucracy as some sort of Orwellian ministry.
That _should_ be their role, but unfortunately they overstepped.
The CDC implemented an eviction moratorium for around a year (September 4, 2020 through August 26, 2021). That had very real, negative impact on landlords during that time. I doubt those effected would call it toothless.
Those landlords should get a real job in that case. They chose to treat housing like a speculative asset and it didn't go their way.
Makes zero sense to me that our pandemic response was about "keeping small businesses afloat" rather than keeping transmission low for a few weeks. I guess besides sacrificing grandma to the economy for $2 margaritas at Applebee's we should have evicted millions during winter so that landlords wouldn't be aversely affected by a pandemic. Weird how the eviction moratorium included aid for them as well, but I guess they were the real victims here and should have gotten more.
Stealing/nationalizing property, even for a year, results in higher costs to do business in the future due to the assumed risk. So I agree with you that this may have helped the single metric in the short term; there are long term consequences.
That means as an individual you will either pay higher rent or be forced to buy. Many people would rather have the flexibility and no maintenance that renting provides.
> Stealing/nationalizing property, even for a year, results in higher costs to do business in the future due to the assumed risk.
It's a good thing that's not what they did, then. Making landlords wait to be paid for a limited time is not the same thing as "stealing," and furthermore there were billions upon billions in subsidies passed around to mitigate the effects of this very reasonable measure.
It's telling that the best we can come up with to criticize the CDC's actions is "won't someone think of the landlords."
We were in a deflation spiral though, which would generally mean that the person receiving the loan (i.e. the tenant) would've been paying negative interest rates. The landlords would've been obligated to make the tenants whole for the 'damages' they received from receiving a loan from the landlords.
> Making landlords wait to be paid for a limit time is not the same thing as "stealing,"
They weren't being paid, that's the whole issue. If they were then an eviction moratorium wouldn't have mattered.
> furthermore there were billions upon billions in subsidies passed around to mitigate the effects of this very reasonable measure
Are government subsidies to corporations something you're supporting here?
> It's telling that the best we can come up with to criticize the CDC's actions is "won't someone think of the landlords."
Property rights are fundamental to a capitalist, free, society. If you want an economic system where property rights are ignored or where the government wholesale manages the economy then just come out and say it.
They were eventually paid. Source: my friend who is a landlord and was not adversely impacted at all in the pandemic.
> Are government subsidies to corporations something you're supporting here?
Actually, in the case I have direct knowledge of, this was direct subsidies to renters (via the Emergency Rental Assistance Program), who then repaid their landlords.
> If you want an economic system where property rights are ignored or where the government wholesale manages the economy then just come out and say it.
I believe we could have an economic system that is so rigid and inflexible that it can't respond sensibly to a crisis and instead forces society into a death spiral to protect capital, but that we're wiser than that.
Not all of them. I know landlords who are still waiting to be paid. The eviction moratorium has ended. The tenant rent assistance program has been closed to new applicants. But the folks running the program have not bothered to make a decision on the existing applications, and eviction is not allowed until those applications have been approved or denied.
The back rent owed exceeds the limits of the assistance program, so even if/when they get paid, it'll be far less than what they are owed. And every month that goes by unpaid isn't covered by the program and will never be paid. But they won't make a decision on the applications, and they won't allow eviction. The homeowners are stuck in an unlimited legal limbo, indefinitely.
By whom? My understanding of the situation was that landlords did not get a subsidy to make up for lost rents or being unable to evict non-paying tenants. Back-rent would be nice, but is not likely, especially with up to 12 months worth.
> I believe we could have an economic system that is so rigid and inflexible that it can't respond sensibly to a crisis and instead forces society into a death spiral to protect capital, but that we're wiser than that.
Well if that's the only choice here, then you made a pretty good argument for it.
Assuming you're in the U.S. there has been positive inflation for decades, so unless you live in a place like Detroit, yes just like every year. This is just an _additional_ factor to raise your rent at an even faster rate.
That's not even considering the currency devaluation, which is probably an even bigger contributing factor than landlord uncertainty. But it sure doesn't help.
The root of the problem is the technocrats in charge. This sh*tshow happened under their direction. People used to get fired (or worse) for doing a lousy job & spoiling the commons. Now they are given even more power, riches, & a ubiquitous voice in all matters.
The CDC's role should 100% _not_ be just about informing people. They and equivalent agencies around the world should have the power to take drastic measures in cases like a pandemic. That's their whole point. It's like saying traffic cops should only give warnings.
But also, semi-related: they implemented a policy to prevent people from becoming homeless during a global pandemic and it had a negative impact on the people who have been padding their bank accounts for decades by steadily increasing margins on a basic life necessity. Sorry if I don't feel bad.
All your examples are not rent-seeking business. People justifiably, in my opinion, look down at that business as it is a zero sum game where people with access to credit bid up access to a fundamental human need.
Not from the US but I disagree. Even an agency like that needs control. We saw what terrorism could do and the real measurable threat to lives through terrorism doesn't even match going for a walk in a lively city. It still justified overbearing surveillance to this day and there was no correction. These mechanisms stay in place and their original justification is forgotten with time and the surveillance will redirect randomly, for example towards people posting comments on Twitter.
At some point someone while sneeze and everyone will be restricted to their homes. Not every bad decision has a bad intend at the start, but they will happen without any form of opposition.
Power doesn't mean unchecked power - like with any powerful organisation, measures should be taken to prevent abuse, but taking the power away in order to prevent abuse won't end well.
> At some point someone while sneeze and everyone will be restricted to their homes
What would their motivation be? Why wouldn't there be any opposition? This isn't like spying where you can do it without people knowing. Even if entirely justified (like we saw during covid), people will oppose such measures - what makes you think they wouldn't of they weren't justified?
If someone is responsible to ensure the health of the population they tend to focus on that task. If a source tells them that imposing a stay at home mandate throughout the year would save 10,000 lives, they might tend to chose it just to not be responsible for these deaths. Only a strong opposition allows them to come to a balanced choice.
Ever noticed that most interior ministers are surveillance freaks? Comes with the job as well. An opposition is actually beneficial for them as the consequences of decisions wouldn't rest on their shoulders alone.
So a solution to this dilemma is to limit powers in the first place. Such decisions should ideally go through parliament in democracies. Sure, sometimes acting fast is beneficial, but just as often quick decisions come with costs as well.
And on top of this: there were ample opportunities for every single state to exercise judicial review of the CDC’s order. The CDC was a politically efficient vessel for an overwhelmingly popular policy that probably kept millions of people from homelessness.
What I mean is that one example doesn't contradict the fact that the CDC had limited direct power during the pandemic, and that various other federal agencies and, even more so, state and local governments were the ones implementing and enforcing most of the restrictions we experienced during the pandemic. I may have exaggerated how minimal the role of the CDC was in my initial comment, but only because I keep seeing this narrative that the CDC was somehow controlling the country. That is spectacularly far from the reality.
Yes, I agree with you. State and local governments had a much larger impact.
My point was the CDC was also forcing people to do things against their will in addition to state and local governments, it just affected fewer people. That force negatively affected many people (mostly landlords and non-US National travelers).
The flip-flop guidance throughout the pandemic was annoying, but completely ignorable.
The event that is being referred to is probably when the CDC decided it had the authority to suspend evictions in the entire United States. It did not, as was decided by the Supreme Court.
I don't think an admonition to stop months after the damage is done is sufficient protection or remedy for government overstepping their powers, and I don't think you do either.
If you are referring to Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden, I don't think that was the Supreme Court. It was a federal court. I have no idea if anyone has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Devoted to the safety of the public, but not necessarily to that of the individual. ref: Tuskegee
They are a government institution, and not to be blindly trusted. They require oversight above and beyond what private institutions require. I'm not sure why you want to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
And? A collection of individuals isn’t an individual. That’s why we don’t say that collectivist societies are all about the individual. They aren’t. It’s the opposite.
It isn’t individualism unless the individual is determining their own goals, and deciding what’s best for themselves. As soon as you have policy deciding what the public good is, you’re no longer discussing what individualists mean by individual freedom, at all. You’re subordinating the individual to the public good. I’m not trying to invalidate your other points, I’m asking you to please not try to frame them as ‘individual freedom, actually.’ I can’t stand doublespeak.
It really is not doublespeak. There are many examples of collective action / public policy that have the effect of maximizing or enabling individual autonomy.
The CDC unilaterally ruled this country for the better part of 2 years. No checks. No balances. Now you could argue that the desperation of the situation calls for something more expedient than Democracy. But many people who supported the moves made by the CDC (including me) were equally horrified that it had as much power to do so.
That is so wildly off the mark it is preposterous. State and local officials were almost entirely responsible for the actual implementation of pandemic response measures. And when various cities and states got tired of the pandemic (despite record deaths) they simply ignored the CDC.
* Outlawed all evictions
* Mandated masks on airplanes and public transportation
* Banned migrants at the border
* Grounded the entire cruise industry
And it's not that those things shouldn't be done. It's that they were done by a body with no checks and balances. None - whatsoever. There should not be a body in our government that can just make laws undemocratically. Or should there? This should be a cause of concern for everyone.
It is kinda like saying well the church did not enact the crusades it was the various kings and sovereigns who did. Well yes, that is true, but the church through its messaging put it into motion.
Sometimes I wonder whether some Americans actually know what governments do or what they're capable of doing. I'm not even sure they're aware of what they expect governments to be able to do. I always see these emotional reactions over something that is the whole point of having a government and its associated institutions and it's like... I didn't know you were an anarchist.
I'd say the worst thing about the past two years is how it's proven how absolutely fucked we are if anything more dangerous and lethal than Covid comes along. There'll be people like this making every effort to prevent governments from doing anything to protect people.
Turns out there are a lot of anarcho-capitalists out there, especially present here on HN, and especially loud during pandemic-related topics. And i thought it's one of those historical things that theoretically exists today as a fringe ( like actual neo-Nazis).
Can you explain this further? My recollection of the past 2 years is quite different, and my understanding of the US government structure is that our elected representatives could overrule the CDC at any time.
Did you support them lying about mask effectiveness, destroying their credibility and leading to deaths?
There's no question the CDC increased deaths by calling masks ineffective at the beginning of the pandemic. Their credibility never recovered, especially not when they are still flip flopping to this day (recommendations on masks oscillated by the week, often in response to public sentiment/political pressure -- not science).
Documented reasoning behind that. Nobody said toilet paper was important and it became scarce. Imagine if they said masks were important. PPE would be impossible to get. Even worse than it already was. With stories like this coming to mind: https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-comptrollers-o...
In a democracy in particular, trust is the most important thing in society. Because actions are not guided by the truth, but by what people think the truth is. And when you lose trust, you lose the ability to influence people's perception of that. In a society where a group is perceived as partisan, they end up only being able to influence a fraction of society.
There was a poll [1] on this specific question (from May 2021 - so right in the middle of the pandemic), and as of then only 52% of Americans felt that the CDC was trustworthy. That factor alone is going to dramatically outweigh any sort of benefit of their lie. And of course it wasn't just the lie, but their general behavior which frequently came off as extremely disingenuous.
In anything even vaguely approaching the longrun, honesty always win. Because while lies may create more optimal outcomes in the extreme shortrun, the decline in trust it causes ultimately means we start getting to play out the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf on a societal level. And that's not pleasant.
> along with the Milgram experiment that people should lookup
Don't bother, the experiment was so unethical it cannot be replicated properly. Furthermore, the way it was presented to the public was deceptive; only some of the results were widely reported and some of those suppressed results draw into question the popular narrative of the experiments outcomes.
For instance, it is popularly claimed in undergrad psych classes that the Milgram experiments showed people comply with authority. But what is meant by authority is left unqualified. In the popularly described versions of the experiments, the authority ('the experimenter') presented themselves as a scientist and used appeals to the value of science to persuade the test subjects ('the teachers'.) What they never deigned to teach me in my undergrad psych class is the compliance rates fell when the presentation of the authority was changed, and also fell when the experiments were performed away from the context of Yale University in New Haven. This suggests that people don't blindly comply with authority; personal value systems play a role in determining how likely somebody is to comply with a particular sort of authority. This seems wholly unsensational to me; somebody who values science is more likely to comply with a scientist. Somebody who likes cops is more likely to comply with cops. And nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann enthusiastically complied with nazi authorities because Eichmann was a nazi (contrary to his claim of merely following any authority blindly.)
As an aside, i recommend the book "Ordinary Men". It tells the story of middle aged reserve policemen that weren't indoctrinated Nazis ( and a non insignificant part of them were communist-sympathising dock workers pre-war) and their trail of atrocities in Poland. It makes a decent case that there's more to it than "was just a Nazi", even if really isn't "just followed authority blindly".
If there is another forum I would hope similar comments are also downvoted or deleted there because it's completely unrelated to the discussion, and you're also taking the opportunity to take cheap political shots at easy targets. Don't do that. Dr. Fauci doesn't even work for the CDC. You're better than this, you don't have to set up these rhetorical traps to have a discussion.
Complaining about negative karma, downvotes, or dislikes is pretty much the best way to receive more of it.
Going on the attack against your imagined perception of your downvoters and then the platform itself and all of its users is also pretty justifiably worth downvoting.
Not a downvoter (to your comment, I rarely vote) but does anybody pro-mask/pro-vaccine/pro-lockdown actually consider him a saviour? All I see (as a non American) is folks on the right hating him being considered a saviour... but I don't find a single post glorifying him even on left-leaning reddit.
I'm a democrat who finds fauci completely uninteresting. He's a skillful bureaucrat with health experience but not an effective communicator. I don't think that listening to him and doing exactly what he suggests is the wisest course of action, but it's certainly not the least wise.
The only people who care about Fauci, or even say his name, are the people who need an effigy to burn and a boogeyman to pin all their fears and conspiracies on. To most Americans, he is a semi-remarkable bureaucrat who had a couple of weeks time on TV and managed to get a tiny bit of name recognition out of it. To the right, he's the central puppet master, solely holding the strings of a shadowy global conspiracy by the Deep State to use 5G and vaccines to mind control the world into the New World Order. Look at their forums, he's somehow become this terrifying Bond Villain to these guys. It used to be Hillary, now it's Fauci. They need an evil mastermind to focus on.
Pro-vax, pro-science here. I respect him for trying to help our society in dealing with infectious disease but do not worship him (that's saved only for David Bowie).
My take on anti-vaxxers is that they have a "religious" relationship to their belief system and therefor project their personal assumptions onto others.
The word "belief" gets mangled intentionally in the case above. "Belief" as in "understand" versus "hold to be true regardless or questioning" are very different things.
I'm humble enough to know that I don't know everything and can be wrong. And if I'm wrong I'm willing to learn anew.
For example, I was raised on the concept that dietary fat was bad (margarine was healthier than butter) and we now know this is not the case.
I'm not a trained immunologist like you, so I can only work with the basic knowledge that the immune system "learns" the chemical fingerprint of attackers and that vaccines mimic that to train the immune system. If I'm wrong I'd love to learn what is correct.
Can you say the same for yourself? Is the arrogance you sense coming from you?
> For example, I was raised on the concept that dietary fat was bad (margarine was healthier than butter) and we now know this is not the case.
Do you know who perpetuated that lie, that dietary fat was bad? Instead of waiting for you to guess, I'll tell you: it was a for-profit industrial complex who wanted to make money.
The pharmaceutical industry is also a for-profit industry, so now that you realize you were tricked about dietary fat - do you presume that the pharmaceutical industry wouldn't do the same?
You have really interesting deflection tactics, I must say, and the put-down attempts are quite subtle compared to most people.
And you're not honest about how a person learns information: you claim you can only work with basic knowledge of the immune system, putting forward that again as a strawman - an argument I never made for you to needd to counter - probably because you weren't able to actually argue against any points I actually made, so you needed the strawman as filler to make it look like you could defend your position.
Here, watch these videos, and then we can actually focus on argument points you disagree with - you'll have to find evidence/sources to refute the specifics to what these highly credentialed and experienced doctors and experts say though, and not just smear campaign articles on them:
I'm curious too, are you familiar with Noam Chomsky's Manufactured Consent book - more so the mechanisms of how you can manipulate a population to being okay with the government taking certain actions?
If someone made a devotional candle of you, wouldn't you buy one? I absolutely would. Not because I think anyone should be praying to me but because it's f'ing hilarious.
I've yet to find any compelling evidence that says that vaccines do not work (in fact quite the contrary).
Conversations with anti-vaxxers in my circle are no different than those of deep religious conviction -- they believe it because they believe it and nothing can change their mind.
Conversely, I'm more than happy to change my mind if compelling evidence/reasoning presents itself. That's not happened yet. Now its your turn: explain why vaccines do not work and how the immune system cannot be trained by exposure to vaccines.
In January 2013, President Barack Obama issued 23 executive orders directing federal agencies to improve knowledge of the causes of firearm violence, what might help prevent it, and how to minimize its burden on public health. One of these orders directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to, along with other federal agencies, immediately begin identifying the most pressing problems in firearm violence research.
The DoJ is not a research institution, and the CDC doesn't only study disease. They study all threats to public health, including smoking, heat waves, and bicycle accidents.
Honestly, this is one of the biggest issues I have with a government bureaucracy like the CDC. The government couldn't be bothered to study AIDS when it emerged in the US and actively denied its existence.
But smoking? Do we really need to study it? It isn't even a disease. The states signed the Master Settlement Agreement. I feel like that should be the last time the government ever brings it up or spends another dollar worrying about it. The corporations were given blanket immunity in exchange for a paycheck. Any further expenditure of government on the subject is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
> But smoking? Do we really need to study it? It isn't even a disease.
Addiction is considered a disease by physicians, psychiatrists, and medical researchers[1].
> I feel like that should be the last time the government ever brings it up or spends another dollar worrying about it.
The CDC publishes research on things like:
- second-hand smoke
- preventing your children from starting to smoke
- the costs to society -- not just the smoker
- pros/cons of taxing tobacco in different ways
Because of government-funded research, smoking is banned in a lot of places that I don't have a choice of avoiding, such as airports, government offices, and grocery stores.
The government's research is to protect non-smokers from corporations that are trying to trick them into an addiction and also from smokers who fill shared air with carcinogens.
And that's not even getting into the cost to society of someone dying early. They leave behind medical debts that increase all of our costs, and they potentially leave behind family members who need care.
No, government research is not "to protect non-smokers from corporations that are trying to trick them into an addiction and also from smokers who fill shared air with carcinogens". This is explicitly what the Master Settlement Agreement does in 46 states. Marketing of tobacco products is nearly eliminated under the MSA. Anti smoking advocacy groups were formed. The pro-tobacco industries groups were dissolved.
If the MSA is failing at that, the solution is to void the agreement and coerce the tobacco industry into another one with updated statues. Not to expand the CDC into areas like tax policy.
And really - "preventing your children from starting to smoke"? There is no research that needs to be done in this area. The industry can't market to children. The industry can't sell to children. There are no shortage of smokers who shared their plight before their death (Yul Brynner comes to mind). If all that isn't enough to stop the problem, then the problem lies elsewhere in society. No more money needs to be evaporated into this "research".
> If all that isn't enough to stop the problem, then the problem lies elsewhere in society.
That is what they're researching: how to stop people from harming themselves, others, and society by smoking.
Tobacco companies can't market directly to children, but they have been working around it in many ways for decades. The latest method is vaping.
Science and policy are not "one and done". We need to know if past policies were mistakes, and we need to adapt new policies to changes in tactics by bad actors.
If vaping is an issue, then the legislature and AG of each state should draft a letter to any companies selling vaping products telling them that they are expected to sign the MSA by a given date. If that doesn't happen, ban the companies products completely and forever. There is no need to waste money researching it. It's nicotine. It's addictive. It's a carcinogen. This has been known for much, much longer than I have been alive.
Coercion is the literal function of government.
The issue is, government is too spineless to ever actually do that. Governments have become dependent on the money that flows in from taxes on those products and settlements like the MSA. They can't actually make good on the threat to ban them because they depend on the money.
So instead we get "research", "negotiations", and "compromise". Which are all a waste of taxpayer money. The US has some of the most brutal punishments in the world for drug trafficking and possession (I think China is actually worse, but I am unsure) for individuals. But we can't just ban the marketing of nicotine containing products and accessories? I don't buy it.
> The government couldn't be bothered to study AIDS when it emerged in the US and actively denied its existence... But smoking?
Would it help to learn that the CDC researched AIDS extensively in the very early 1980s (as well as one small study from 1978-1984)? That they tracked the spread of AIDS worldwide during that time, and were the first to identify blood-transfustions as a vector for infection. That in 1982/1983 they were issuing guidance for dealing with suspected cases - 2 years before there was a test. That the CDC hosted the first international symposium on AIDS in 1985?
The solution there is not to get information from the president, but from the experts.
Smoking was something they started researching after they were granted more investigative powers in 1987 and 1992 bringing their scope beyond "disease" to "health research". And messaging. AFAIK, most research they do on smoking is on smoking cessation programs and the efficacy of anti-smoking measures. Well, and thanks to vaping, a lot on the health effects of that.
Can a mania be a disease? The CDC can't study gun violence using epidemiology and the DEA says there is no legitimate use of Cannabis. Both seem anti-science to me.
The CDC isn't limited to studying disease. That was their original mission, but Congress expanded it to include a variety of health related issues, including environmental effects, dangers associated with jobsites, etc. it also is mandated to collect statistics that impact public health.
They do, they choose not to. That they cannot by some law is a myth. Obama even called them out on it.
Obama also had them author a massive study on all aspects of gun violence, but the results went quite against what the Dems wanted to claim, so it got pretty quiet again.
What happened is they did publish some studies, and one was quite bad (to this day the author will not release the dataset, for example), but was invoked for a lot of policy. Congress chastised them for it, banned them from advocating public policy, but they did not ban the CDC from studies (and they still do studies, very few - if you search you can find them).
When people reference the CDC not being able to study gun violence, they're referring to the Dickey Amendment of 1996. With the ambiguity in interpretation of "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control" coupled with an earmark that shifted the exact amount the CDC had allocated to gun violence research to something unrelated, it ended up being, at minimum, a de facto ban on gun violence research (with a strongly implied threat of funding cuts for breaking the ban). There were exceptions to the de facto ban when they had marching orders from elsewhere, e.g. Obama's directive after Parkland.
That said, 2018 finally saw an interpretation of the Dickey Amendment codified that allowed, unambiguously, research into gun violence. And 2020 finally saw funding allocated for gun violence research. So, after over two decades, the CDC finally regained both the go ahead and the funding.
Given the above, I think it's still reasonable for people to use the shorthand of saying the CDC had been banned from doing gun violence research. Softening the language to be slightly less absolute would help, but I'd consider people to be in the ballpark of correct when they call it a ban on research. And it's also correct that that's no longer the case, thankfully.
A 1993 Kellerman article claiming guns in the home increased homicides. From what I recall, he would not release his dataset to other researchers, and many other researchers couldnt replicate his work.
Kellerman’s methodology that he published among swaths of missing data included ~250 phone surveys where someone was shot in their own home and a police report was filed (nothing verified, no concern to who owned the gun or who was shot). This was FAR more representative of drug use and domestic violence than a typical gun owner - yet - it was used as a primary factor to the push assault weapon ban and Brady Bill in 94. This then directly led to the Republican blowout of 96 and likely costing Al Gore the presidency in 2000 according to Bill Clinton. Kellermann is an absolute hack who still enjoys appearances on NPR, ABC, etc as a gun violence expert.
Actually they do. They have performed some firearms research in recent years. The restriction is just that the money cannot be spent on studies looking to support gun control. They choose to err on the side of caution and limit the studies rather than seek clarification through the courts on what would constitute supporting a policy.
I think the person you are responding to knows the CDC has done studies about gun violence, but does not believe the CDC has any authority to actually do them.
>virtually unlimited executive powers the CDC believes it has
is not true"
This is from the same user. That and the use of "even" in the other comment makes me think they believe that the CDC can't do/fund firearm research, as that is a common media/political narrative.
Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?
I don't agree with anybody tracking me, but even say insurance companies which is the other worst thing that comes to mind have limited purview in what they might be interested in
> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions.
Their charter is disease control. How you 'live your life' is orthogonal to that mission - they're responsible for stopping you from infecting other people with communicable diseases. That is also your own responsibility, and just because responsibilities aren't always things you want to do doesn't mean they're oppression.
> How you 'live your life' is orthogonal to that mission
orthogonal does not mean what you think it means given your usage. orthogonal means its entirely unrelated. but the fact is disease control and being able to make personal choices w/ respect to living your life can be in direct conflict means its not orthogonal.
apologies for this correction orthogonal is just one of my favorite words. =)
It's definitely not orthogonal to how you live your life; their very purpose is to limit how you live your life in order to prevent/reduce behaviors that spread disease. For example, they issue quarantine orders.[1]
People understand that is their mission. Some find it scary.
Everyone has a different threshold at which they start to object to the CDC overriding people's freedom in the pursuit of disease control, but everyone will object at some point. For example, would you accept a Shanghai-style lockdown?
> their very purpose is to limit how you live your life
Their purpose is to increase the overall duration of healthy life we have, both individually and in aggregate. Limiting how you live your life is, again, orthogonal to that.
For example, how is their campaign to control mosquitos and eradicate malaria in the US limiting how you live your life?
I'm going to assume that you are discussing in good faith, as per the HackerNews commenting guidelines, and did not deliberately pick a specific CDC campaign as a strawman.
The CDC's campaign to control mosquitos and eradicate malaria in the US probably does not limit how people are living their lives, but ordering an immediate nationwide halt on evictions of any renter for nonpayment of rent would be an example of applying limitations on people.
Say the thing they ordered. They didn't allow evicting millions of Americans during winter in a global pandemic. They're also tracking people to make sure lockdown guidelines were followed. Of course Americans could not follow a guideline to save their lives, and now over a million preventably dead Americans get to be summarily forgotten because the real victim was your ability to go to a bar or concert when hospitals were renting refrigerated trucks to hold bodies.
I find it pretty encouraging that of all the possible examples of the CDC using its statutory authority you could think of, the example that comes to mind is that they took away a person's freedom to be evicted.
The goal of public health is to increase overall health, yes, but that goal can easily conflict with individual freedoms. For example, smoking bans:
> Supporters argue by presenting evidence that smoking is one of the major killers, and that therefore governments have a duty to reduce the death rate, both through limiting passive (second-hand) smoking and by providing fewer opportunities for people to smoke. Opponents say that this undermines individual freedom and personal responsibility, and worry that the state may be encouraged to remove more and more choice in the name of better population health overall.
The main thing that public health agencies do is promote healthy behaviors, like, for example, washing your hands. You could say that their primary goal is convincing you to “live your life” in a healthy way.
The CDC's mission is fundamentally the same as the mission of the Chinese disease control agency. The difference is how that mission is balanced against people's freedom to live their lives.
Please don't misunderstand; that doesn't mean that I oppose everything they do. Everything they do limits freedom, but sometimes that is necessary.
Ahh, I see where the confusion is. They actually have authority to issue legally binding orders.
"To help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and help our country cope during the pandemic, CDC has occasionally issued legally binding orders and regulations."
Not all such orders are listed on that page. For example, "CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky today signed an order determining the evictions of tenants for failure to make rent or housing payments could be detrimental to public health control measures".
> In 1979, the U.S. Surgeon General identified violent behavior as a key public health priority. In 1980, CDC began studying patterns of violence. This effort grew into a national program to reduce the death and disability associated with injuries outside the workplace. In 1992, CDC established the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) as the lead federal organization for violence prevention. The Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) is one of three divisions within NCIPC. DVP is focused on preventing violence and its consequences so that all people, families, and communities are safe, healthy, and free from violence.
They've been saying "Spanish Flu - give us money" for years and we find out that they didn't bother to research how any of the flus are transmitted.
It's not like flus haven't been killing 35-75k Americans every year for as long as anyone has counted.
Speaking of the Spanish Flu, Fauci's PhD was on how improvised masks made it worse...
Also, one of the big Spanish Flu outbreaks was "credited" to a parade, aka "a bunch of people walking down the street together." What did the CDC say about such events? (Hint: it praised them if they were BLM.)
Do you really want to argue that the public health community was saying "hey, we're only interested in influenza" when they used various pandemics to argue for funding for the last 80+ years? (Influenza wasn't even distinguished until the mid 30s.)
Yes, Covid-19 is SARS2. My point is that SARS1 was 10 years ago, which is plenty of time for the public health community to do relevant research and yet ....
Do you want to bet that they didn't fundraise off of SARS1 specifically? And yet...
So what? They may be coming from a politicized angle, and probably only passing facts that support their case, but at least they are facts, and not misinformation, like graphene in vaccines or whatever. Everyone is coming from some bias and angle, so don't judge on that. Judge on the veracity of the statements. Do you have anything to say about the actual statements?
Most everything that is wrong with modern discourse is due to ad hominem and labeling rather than discussion of facts.
If your local fire department made masks mandates part of the fire safety code they'd be just as hated in that neighborhood. No matter how nice, kind and inspiring the people who work there are.
> Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?
Yes? As the CDC's only enforcement mechanisms are generally small teams in tyvek suits with fertilizer sprayers with bleach. Their primary function is public advisement and their employees are civilian.
So yes, CIA, FBI, IRS, NSA, military, Homeland security (tsa and coast guard), grb; but also Facebook, apple, Google, at&t.
> Can someone name a scarrier (sp) entity that could be tracking you?
... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex?
Unless you buy into conspiracies, the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you, and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.
> the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you
I don't want to get involved with what the CDC is doing here (because they're probably not doing anything too nefarious), but I would like to pull this point out. The intentions of an institution (or at least surface level justifications) are kind of unrelated to the point. What an institution thinks is best for someone and what that individual thinks is best for themselves are often quite different.
I'm reminded of the old CS Lewis quote here:
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
I don't approve of using the term conspiracies as a way to denounce the questioning of true intentions or possible problem areas.
Unless someone can prove that no one involved in the tuskegee "incident"[0] is no longer employed or influential at the CDC I will just resign myself to thinking that THEY are the conspiracy theorist, a conspiracy to seem infallible or at least incorruptible. Such a concept is of course ridiculous, don't turn off your brain with an appeal to authority.
>Unless someone can prove that no one involved in the tuskegee "incident"[0] is no longer employed or influential at the CDC I will just resign myself to thinking that THEY are the conspiracy theorist,
The Tuskegee Experiment started 90 years ago and ended 50 years ago. I don't know what proof you need, but the simple facts of human biology basically guarantee that anyone who had any power during that timeframe is no longer working at the CDC.
There are doctors, lawyers, administrators, and talking heads in their 80s who are well known and respected in their fields today. My knowledge of biology and arithmetic puts them at around 30 years old in the year 1972. That's the year the program ended.
If not the CDC then maybe we should just question everyone's motives and I apologize for trying the sensationalist approach.
The problem with paranoia is that it's one of those things that can be self-fulfilling the more common it is, as the paranoid nutters get into power and work together disable the conspiracies they perceive at everyone's expense, thus justifying and magnifying the beliefs of the paranoid nutjobs on the other side (and so on).
> At some point, you have to have some level of trust in society and its institutions. Or become a paranoid nutter.
I see this as a false dichotomy. It is possible to simply assume that everyone is doing their best, and that is "not necessarily great" due to poor system design and various other reasons, or it may be even worse due to some bad actors - but necessarily becoming a paranoid nutter is a false belief, and the commonality of such beliefs makes me suspicious that they are not entirely organic.
Not denouncing, just answering a loaded question by putting my finger in the barrel.
I think we can talk about our concerns in a realistic way without resorting to baseless speculation. It's fair to question whether the CDC should be using this data.
The thing about Tuskegee is that it wasn't a conspiracy. It started in 1932, in a time when the majority of Americans probably would have supported it if they knew about it. That doesn't make it OK, but it does make it a poor example of a conspiracy.
Systems and incentives are much better predictors of behavior.
Yes, we should talk about the system and incentives of the revolving-doors between massive corporations and government bodies meant to govern those corporations. With the cash/status/power incentives attached.
You don't need an explicit intentional criminal conspiracy when a "conspiracy of common interests" can produce similar results.
I don't believe conspiracy necessarily has to be for a goal that is against majority support. I.e. someone may conspire against a minority. Conspiracy is by virtue of not disclosing actions or their goals. I.e. the subjects of the study would definitely see it as a conspiracy against them.
The relevant argument here would be the extent to which this approach to scientific experimentation was normal at that point in time and how it compares to current protocols. I.e. whether CDC aligns with scientific research protocols and therefore the focus would be on whether these protocols are strong enough to warrant broad access to data without consent.
Acknowledged, I mostly don't want to talk past others who are hung up on conspiracies (pro or against). Much more fruitful is definitely the analysis of strategies and games and actors. Their power or influence and their motivations.
The career is long certainly but I think we all believe we are evolving in our careers. No one here would want to be accused of working in the same way or having the same knowledge in year 1 of their career compared to today.
The CDC has a lot to make up for - it also started in 1946, after tuskegee was started
>and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.
You can't go a decade of American history without some sort of "yeah that's F'ed up" thing happening that was done with good intentions. Saying constitutional checks and balances prevent bad things from happening is like when the police say they investigated themselves. In reality the public needs to remain vigilant and press the issue.
> Unless you buy into conspiracies, the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you, and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.
Technically, someone buying into conspiracies would at most have a correlation to CDC activities, it couldn't exert a causal force.
Also, you don't actually know what the CDC is going to do, or how well it is constrained by constitutional checks and balances - you can speculate and form a belief, but you do not have actual knowledge.
>... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex?
The mafia is easy. Pay them and they DGAF what you do. Creepy ex is more or less a non-issue because any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person.
It's the police, terrorists and other well resourced but potentially capricious organizations (like the CDC, or any other federal bureaucracy, obviously the trigger happy ones are higher on the list), the kind of organizations who can send a dozen thugs to kick in your door and who have diffused responsibility across so many people you can't "get even" that you don't want coming after you.
>the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you,
Every horror in history was committed with the best of intentions.
Edit: and to be clear, I'm not too worried about the CDC themselves, I'm worried about the legions of useful idiots that will happily take whatever they say and run with it. If the CDC makes BS or politically charged recommendations there is a myriad of other institutions (government and otherwise) that will see that as their ticket to do whatever bad thing they were already fishing for a reason to do. I don't want anyone having my data. But given the choice I'd rather have people who want to sell me penis pills and time shares have my data than people who want to tell me how to live.
Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups. What exactly do you fear from the CDC, and who do you fear they will do it to? Not just a challenge, a genuine question.
>Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups
The CDC has a historical record of such things. What makes you think human beings are incapabale of repeating such crimes against humanity?
I don't. But so could elementary school teachers, the National Black Caucus, or the sanitation workers union. It's much more productive to talk about actual concerns. Do you have any to share?
Is there any historical precedent of elementary school teachers committing crimes against humanity comparable to public health officials?
>It's much more productive to talk about actual concerns. Do you have any to share?
Are you not familiar with any of the historical atrocities committed by public health officials across the world since the beginning of "public health"?
The holocaust had decidedly not "good intentions". No, not even by its own definition, and definitely not in the sense the term is constantly abused as some magic bullet to refute any position that is otherwise unassailable.
It was public health officials, doctors and psychiatrists who helped lay the foundation for the holocaust, under the auspices of public health and fighting disease.
The Nazis gassed people because they thought that eliminating the demographics they were gassing would lead to a better society. Sure the people at the top knew it was questionable but the guy loading the train had spent a decade reading newspapers full of junk and thought he was deporting undesirables.
The American Indians who's culture was systematically destroyed, all those people the eugenicists sterilized, the black communities that were turned into crap over the 50s and 60s, all of that was done by people trying to their little part make the world a better place.
You are being obtuse - in neither of the cases did anyone involved believe people being killed were killed for their own good. The 'other' were being killed so that the right people can benefit.
Fine. You're right. That was unfair. I'm just annoyed that there is wholesale bullshit going on in this comment thread about the data and I applied that annoyance to you. Consider the comment withdrawn.
In all those cases there was a pre-existing, widespread social bias and open bigotry against the groups being targeted - which of course doesn't make it right, but does explain why such things were tolerated and even thought to be good ideas in those societies. But in most of those cases, I would argue that the intentions of the leadership enacting such policies did not do so out of pure-though-extremely-misguided intentions. They acted in various ways to disenfranchise and disempower (gross understatement in the case of the holocaust!) the groups being targeted, playing to the gallery and entrenching their own power.
As I read the sentiment in the US (as an outsider), I find it hard to believe the CDC are playing to the gallery here. I think there is a genuine intention on the part of the CDC (despite the CDC being a key bogeyman in many flavours of fever-dream). The problem is that the culture of secrecy and "for your own good" in the US is so entrenched (because it's soooo much easier than trying to educate folks), that combined with past mistakes, trust has been irrevocably eroded to the extent that everything is doubted by everyone.
My own view is that this is symptomatic of a huge malaise in the US and to a lesser (but growing) extent in the rest of the world. Can the idea of "society" function in the face of such mistrust in instututions? I doubt it. We are increasingly voluntarily partitioning ourselves into tribes/bantustans and shrinking the circle of trust. To my mind that model doesn't scale well with population. Bad times ahead.
That's a perfectly pointless and tautological argument, then. Because anything anybody ever did was considered by that person to be useful to themselves at that point of time.
It has nothing to do with the cliché about "good intentions", which rests on a theory of using some universally accepted "good" as cover or argument for some action, or even as the true motivation for actions that end up having unwanted side effects.
The Nazis did not use anything like that to advertise the Holocaust. In fact they did not advertise the Holocaust at all: while any thinking German had an inkling, official communications only ever spoke of "resettlements".
There was very little virtue signaling with the Nazis, in other words. Much like their brethren today, they very much knew they were the baddies and embraced that status with a certain sense of "so what?", hence skulls as insignia: it's an open acknowledgement that you reject common concepts of virtue with full knowledge, and that you enjoy using raw power to do so. "Owning the libs" 1.0, so to speak.
> Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?
FBI, CIA, local police, any branch of military, Oathkeepers (a group that did track me for a while because I organized a pro-voting event in my city)... it's a very long list. Basically anyone with a gun and a desire to harm me is a lot scarier.
In the past, companies used to assassinate leaders of unionization efforts, too.
> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?
This describes every AdTech firm to a T, except that you’ve decided to direct your ire at a public health agency instead of them. The entire point of commercial advertising is to nudge your purchasing behavior (what they’ll blithely refer to as “lifestyle”); the CDC has no such motive.
There is an enormous difference between a corporation "nudging" me to buy something with an ad, and a government body using the full weight of its authority to force my compliance with their policies. I'm much more comfortable being nudged than I am being forced.
There is indeed an enormous difference, but I find this reasoning funny: when a government issues an order by fiat, there is no ambiguity with regards to your consent. You can either be on board or not; either way, there is a clear line between your opinion (and therefore what you will) and what is dictated to you.
This can’t be said for nudges: the entire point of an effective nudge is that you can’t be certain that you aren't acting of your own volition. That strikes me as a much worse state of affairs: not only are you controlled, but you don’t even know it!
TL;DR: two years after this entire fracas, it’s apparent that the government’s ability to force you to do anything w/r/t public health is mostly hollow. Meanwhile, the continence of our actions online seems to be increasingly shaky.
Not exactly, you can be on board or suffer whatever punitive action is designed to "incentivize" you. You can't just politely decline to comply or participate.
> not only are you controlled, but you don’t even know it
I don't think we should equate "being controlled" - which is a rather horrific thing when done directly with the threat of violence - with being nudged. When you are nudged, you are in fact acting of your own volition. If you disagree you have to define what "your own volition" means exactly. To me it means acting in the absence of a threat of violence.
> the government’s ability to force you to do anything w/r/t public health is mostly hollow
Plenty of business owners were arrested and imprisoned for refusing to comply with public health measures. Many, many more suffered the closure of their business and the loss of their livelihoods by complying.
Yes, that’s normally how taxes and uniform policies work. I suppose you could be opposed to either or both of those things in the abstract, but expressing your ire at vaccines specifically strikes me as special pleading.
If you are that scared of people that have more knowledge than you on topics that take decades of study to understand I can't imagine how scared you should be of politicians. On average they have close to zero knowledge about anything yet wield power to change almost any facet of your life.
Personally I'm sticking with the scientists, atleast they earnt that power through real excellence rather than winning some popularity contest.
> Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention.
That's not a fair response given the examples provided to you.
OP's comment mentioned the Cambridge Analytica case which-- if true-- is certainly more concerning than someone advertising at you.
It's one thing to argue that case was overblown, but it's not serious to sweep it into the bin of "otherwise grab my attention."
Edit: changed the word "satisfactory" to "fair." It's not that the comment I'm replying to wasn't tasty enough for my enjoyment or something. It's more that it hand-waved away the point OP was making.
I know we are getting off track here somewhat. But it's group A wants this data to better understand society in order to save lives, while every other group want this data to increase their profits.
To your point, yes we shouldn't allow tracking. But, whatever fix we apply should not be so limited that it only affects the CDC, it should be generally applied to stop all groups as well.
> group A wants this data to better understand society in order to save lives
In principle, I agree with the idea of anonymous data used exclusively and apolitically to "understand society" as you say. I just see no evidence that would ever be possible, either to trust that it will be kept anonymous or that whatever conclusion get drawn from it and acted upon will be remotely nonpartisan. It's sad in a sense, but I think the only viable solution is to reject any notion of tracking, no matter how much anyone swears they'll only use it for what they consider good.
That said, I may be missing something but I still think it's less worrisome to hear that private companies are using information that customers didn't actively hide and provided by voluntarily using their product (I still don't like it, but I don't think it should be illegal for a company to say "we're giving you this tracking device", use it and get a discount). Compared with the government, given the whole "monopoly of violence" thing or whatever weaker version you like, and also as the agent of the people, to be using that data, I think is a whole different think. Same as there is a difference between an ISP logging your internet traffic, and one voluntarily giving that information to the government and effectively becoming a government agency.
Anyway, this is going too far astray, and getting too long, you see my point about the distinction
> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions
The CDC primarily exists to address collective risk with collective decisions in the face of public health and especially infectious disease events where the dynamics are inevitably collective.
Sometimes collective decisions curb individual freedom -- like curbs literally do, along with a host of related automotive policies one could use as analogs. Criticizing the CDC for "wanting a say" is like criticizing any other area in which collective government wants a say: it's fine to talk about limits to what government should be able to require and what would constitute a compelling reason for doing so (and in fact, that's what citizens of a democratic republic should do), but speaking as if it's a threat to "want a say" in general is unbalanced.
> And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science".
Whether they decide to make their decisions on the basis of science observation and study or not, no public institution in the United States has unchecked power, there are always avenues for feedback and change, especially if you have a point that other people find persuasive.
And personally, I'd prefer most institutions made their decisions informed by scientific efforts, which would make them accountable both to fellow professionals in their field and other democratic institutions.
I’m not sure the CDC should be making collective decisions. The CDC was originally envisioned as a center of excellence providing specific operational support and services to states. There’s been a lot of scope creep.
Debate about which level of government certain classes of public health decisions should be made it is respectable.
Although we've have had a chance to see some of the issues with mismatched state-level responses. Infectious agents don't seem to care much about any border their hosts can cross.
> they can have unchecked power by invoking "science".
I find it incredible that people are capable of discrediting the very process that resulted in the platform for their ability to express that.
The ability for you to press a key, have that intent transmitted to a micro-circuit, have that micro-circuit calculate how to display that character on a pixel grid, and see that result on a display is the result of more than a millenia of an intellectual process called "science." The same intellectual process discovered germs in ~1665, or 368 years ago. Very shortly after we discovered germs we realized that isolation would prevent the spread of germs from one person to another.
People who referred to it as "science," chose to discredit/ignore it and put scientists into the situation where they were trying to figure out how to keep a sinking ship afloat. You know, by doing what scientists have always done: drawing facts from real-world data.
But no, let's rather believe that 368 years ago some rotten fellow initiated massive a conspiracy, which millions of "scientists" for generations to come kept secret, so that in the 2020's the CDC could collect cellphone data for a few months and ruin your insurance profile.
> I find it incredible that people are capable of discrediting the very process that resulted in the platform for their ability to express that.
Nobody was trying to discredit science.
Some people refer to "science" (in quotes) because any criticism of a policy or individual was cynically dismissed as a criticism of science itself.
"So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science" is an actual quote by someone in power to shut sceptics down.
The people who used science as a shield from criticism of course wanted everyone to forget that in complex situations, especially in a new situation where not enough data is available, it's very common that scientists disagree on something.
Being sceptical of a scientist's interpretation of reality is actually science.
You are absolutely correct from a theoretical standpoint. Completely neutral, independent medical experts should, on average, make better health decisions than an uninformed populace.
The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.
This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.
If your concern is a patchwork of local rules, that isn’t on the CDC they set consistent national rules.
If your concern is changing rules over time that seems more optimal than maintaining the most draconian rules both from a freedom standpoint and a public health one. Essentially you want enough exposure to push herd immunity or lockdown never ends, but not excessive exposure or the health system collapses. If you track the number of people in hospitals over time especially in terms of local hotspots it explains the CDC’s behavior quite well.
I don't think the most perverse behavior we've seen in the CDC has a been a result of political pressure from the executive branch. They seemed to be fairly effective at maneuvering around the Trump administration's attempts to influence their policy. Like most people, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the "better safe than sorry" side of things and was generally supportive of their recommendations.
Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.
The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.
The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.
For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.
I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.
I don’t disagree with much here. I’ll just offer that Michael Lewis’ recent reporting does seem to implicate a culture of political awareness that negatively impacts the organization’s ability to engage in effective leadership.
Trial and error. The velocity of information exchange that happens on the ground from trial and error - compounded by network effects - is far higher than the exchange that is happening in substantially smaller (CDC) groups at the top with slower speed. They don't iterate as fast and have a bias to move slow.
More importantly. Average knowledge is not important. What matters is that exchange happens so that the optimal decision is arrived at and communicated much faster by a large group , even if each individual knows very little information themselves.
This is the same principle that rules over new tech adoption. You don't need to know how to replicate the new tech, or even how to operate it.
You just need to know it works . That's what real (applied?) knowledge is about, at least in the context above.
insurance companies which is the other worst thing that comes to mind have limited purview in what they might be interested in
"Sir, we've dropped your health insurance policy because we've noticed from your location history that you frequent fast food restaurants, which is defined in your health insurance policy as a 'prohibited unhealthy lifestyle'."
"Sir, we've determined from your location history that you average 5 mph over the speed limit, so we're reclasifying you as a 'high risk' driver and increasing your premiums"
While it IS creepy for a government to track people I think the problem is not the CDC, it's the police, FBI, secret service and other "you can go to jail if I think you were 15 meters too close to that agent that got shot last week". Does that answer your question?
Lots of big words there, little meaning: Everyone wants a say in how people live their lives, including those advertising companies. The CDC actually does know some things better than at least some individuals, because they spend a lot of money on research while the individual, at best.. well, just look around.
I don't see them believing they have unchecked power, or they would ne enjoying their magical empire right now. And I have no idea what specific harm CDC tracking could enable, even assuming they tried?
This was a public health agency recommending the most trivial countermeasures against the worst acute disease afflicting the world in a century. A three-year old with a LEGO understanding of germ theory and bodily fluids would come up with masks and staying away from other people. As the pandemic ends, so do all countermeasures, and life rapidly returns to normal. It is utterly insane to see this sequence of events as anything but the most obvious, predictable, harmless, working-as-intended storyline.
> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions.
Well the context of DISEASE CONTROL is different from the context of individuals living their best lives. Take as long as you need to wrap your head around that.
> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions.
Would you like me to show this to my friends who work at the CDC and record their reactions for you? Oh how they wish...
The CDC doesn't want to control you, they just want you to wash your damn hands. They aren't invoking 'science' (with or without the scare quotes) - they are doing science because understanding whether, how, and why people follow the requests of public health officials is useful to know to both model and make decisions about the next pandemic. It is also just basically their mandate.
this ' ' ' science ' ' ' is more about realizing that ' ' ' controlling people ' ' ' is a lost cause, and just trying to figure out how to prevent the spread of infectitious diseases given the new reality of self important typhoid marys.
The fact that you think the people who eradicated smallpox are scarier than the CIA or facebook is just patently absurd.
Is there any evidence an ethics committee was party to this? If in fact, one was, they found it ethical to consume personally identifiable data without those persons’ authorization?
Going off “CDC’s Policy on Distinguishing Public Health Research and Public Health Nonresearch” linked from that page, I would guess this activity they’d call “nonresearch.”
I read the guidelines for compliance and my interpretation is that it fulfills the requirements for research while it does not fulfill the requirements for nonresearch. The scope of this reaches all of society instead of the study participants.
I don't think ethics committees are worth the chairs they sit on, but "personally identifiable data"? How did you conclude that it was personally identifiable?
Agreed. The data broker that the CDC got this data from is SafeGraph. What we really should be asking is what "partners" SafeGraph got this data from, and how.
The U.S. Govt used individuals' Census data to round up Japanese-Americans for FDR's World War II internment camps. They also lied about it and claimed that they were only using anonymized data.
Humans have a long and storied record of using tools and information to do malicious things. But we also have a long and storied record of using tools and information to produce the incredible advances of the past few centuries, where the median life expectancy has nearly doubled from the baseline over the past 50k years.
Personally, I would really prefer a system where health information was centralized and easily transferrable to healthcare providers, as I think it would be massively better if we could learn from the bad outcomes of others rather than creating thousands of information silos that have to learn these expensive lessons in parallel, and it would also allow us to know the prices of healthcare services thereby enabling efficient markets to develop.
As a data scientist, I am oriented towards mining data for valid insights that allow us to answer important questions, such as
* "Who was in close proximity (~15m) of this known COVID superspreader event?" or
* "Who has spent a large amount of time in this region where the rate of cancer is 6 standard deviations above the statewide rate?"
So yeah, I'm firmly asserting location data enables us to explore a lot of important problems that negatively impact people's health, and I think learning from the past (ie from data) is how we improve the future.
Just because data is used in understanding something related to health doesn't mean that it's "health data" in a legal, protected, or regulatory sense. Nor does it mean that they should have de facto access to the data without limitations. Hell, the closest thing I'm aware of that's close to it (at least under HIPAA) is the name or address of a hospital that a person's visited.
Would you be okay if the CDC purchased data from period-tracking apps to track periods? Or how many bottles of soap I purchase in a year? Or how much booze everyone buys?
Can you provide a link the statute or other ratified text that you're basing your "health data" categorization on?
By the way, HIPAA privacy rules regulate the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI) in healthcare treatment, payment and operations by covered entities.
Per this CDC FAQ [0]:
"""
What information is protected?
All medical records and other individually identifiable health information used or disclosed by a covered entity in any form, whether electronically, on paper, or orally, are covered by the final rule.
For what disclosures and uses must consent be obtained by a provider?
The Privacy Rule states that:
In general, “[a] covered health care provider [with a direct treatment relationship] must obtain the individual’s consent,…prior to using or disclosing protected health information to carry out treatment, payment, or health care operations.” (See section [§] 164.506, 65 Federal Register [F.R.] p. 82810, for complete requirements.)
"""
Non-covered entities, like commercial data brokers, are free to sell PHI-containing data (assuming they aren't contractually prevented from doing so), and unless the data said broker sells is from a covered entity, no plausible interpretation bars the CDC from buying data available to anyone.
> Would you be okay if the CDC purchased data from period-tracking apps to track periods? Or how many bottles of soap I purchase in a year? Or how much booze everyone buys?
Legally? Yes, unambiguously. Morally? Depends on what they're do with their analysis. If it's for disease control and/or harm prevention, that seems to fall squarely within their scope.
My problem is absolutely related to data privacy and I'm not sure why you think otherwise, let alone why you think I'm interested in spreading disease (seriously, what.). At a practical level, one of my bigger concerns is that they've very likely made it possible to FOIA for the location information they bought.
The data couldnt be foiaed because it’s not the government’s. Anyway, someone could just buy it direct anyway.
This is why I don’t understand your concerns. You start off freaking out about the public health officials having widely available location data, and keep harping about the government, but never once focusing on the actual data collection by private entities. Come on. Do you really think Foursquare is HIPPA compliant?
3. Foursquare isn't bound by HIPAA because they're not a covered entity, unlike the CDC.
4. Believe me, I'm livid about the selling and collection by private entities.
5. I'm only bringing up the FOIA side of things in an attempt to highlight something that you might not have considered. Judging by your misunderstanding of HIPAA and FOIA, it seems that you could stand to consider more.
Yes, but those threats already exist regardless and stopping the sale of carrier data won't stop them.
Ideally you'd want to stop both, but if I had to choose I'd prefer that only the government has access rather than the highest bidder (which can be the government if they so desire, so in the end you're back at square one anyway).
Did you know there are many classes of crime that follow the pattern you spoke of
"It already exists out there, and will persist even if I stop, I'm not creating it just propagating it..."
One pretty nasty example would be revenge porn.
a lesser one would be piracy of copyright material
They also have a long and storied history of helping the public avoid widespread disasters and preventing larger outbreaks of disease through using data.
Of course one has to keep government( agencie)s in check, but to compare the CDC to the Stasi.... I don't know if that's really an apt or appropriate comparison
Right, because businesses have never done anything bad with data, it's all those government guys. The government of course being the one tasked with improving the health and welfare of the population, not with turning a profit.
As long as every branch of "Government" has the authority to escalate to forcible imprisonment for noncompliance with their policy, I will be equally mistrustful of all of them.
Sure but sometimes you just want to get the pothole outside your house fixed, which requires being able to construct (even for just the short term, privatise that road if you) systems and incentives that work for real problems, which in turn requires people to (regardless of trust) get their arms dirty which I think is unlikely if you have everyone trying to propitiate to the ghost of Ronald Reagan.
Systems of incentives are just fine, as long as they're voluntary. My objection is with forced participation in these systems. If you want to get that pothole fixed, and a few of your neighbours don't consent to contribute, then we should be able to deal with that in a way that doesn't involve handcuffs and prison sentences.
Do you live off the grid and grow all of your own food? If not, then the "government" keeps you alive. You don't have to give them a free pass on everything but you can't pretend it serves no purpose but to oppress you.
I'm not pretending that at all, all I'm suggesting is that the government be entrusted with the least amount of authority it requires. I also think that the model for our collective action should be much more consensual, rather than enforced.
I think the more complete formulation is that the government has a monopoly on the legal use of violence. (Which I suppose isn't really true in all contexts: violence by private citizens can be legal when defending private property, for instance. But aside from small carve-outs for personal security, self-defense, and private property it generally holds.)
The problem is that this data is available for anyone to purchase. And anyone includes groups that you don't want to have it.
Some people focus their attention on limiting the government's ability to collect this information, but just go about ignoring businesses being legally allowed to keep and sell this data. Now the government is leveraging privatized markets for all of their spying needs and it is neatly kept out of the courts.
As the article points out, it wasn't just the CDC performing these kinds of analysis. News organizations were doing the same thing.
If we want to curb government surveillance, we need to curb corporate surveillance by legally enshrining a right to privacy that limits the information that companies can collect and sell. Which, ironically, will mean government regulation and enforcement.
The problem could also be said to start with software. Particularly Apple and Google for allowing specific location information to be used in the same app as advertising. The problem is that all apps are granted access to the internet.
Nip those two things in the bud and the problems will slow down, I think. But it's a pipe-dream, I know.
In the early days of Android, I remember reading that Android was Android because you had to jump through all these permission hoops with j2me (Java 2 Mobile Edition). Hence, Android was better and more easy to use than j2me.
Here we are, 15 years later with exactly the same set of permissions problems... with one exception, Android still gives out internet access without permission. Many devs here would be aghast at the idea of an app not being internet connected.
I believe Google did it that way because Steve Jobs had done it that way in the iPod and iPhones. (I presume there's some HN'ers here that can refute this?)
I remember my colleagues at the time remarking how refreshing it was to not have to deal with permissions (because customers disliked all the modal permissions that popped up in j2me)... and we all jumped on board the iPhone and Android development train, not knowing the problems that we'd have down the line.
How could you even prevent the government from accessing the data if any random company with a few bucks can get it?
If you had really strong safeguards, maybe you can stop the government from accessing it directly but what kind of safeguards are going to stop contractors of contractors of contractors from doing what every other private company does?
I'm not afraid of marketing flyers. I can handle crap like that. Highly Targetted Advertising, as annoying as it is, doesn't threaten to lock me up if I don't purchase something.
But I can't stop an inadequate power hungry government bureaucrat threatening me and my family over whatever because they want to feel important or powerful over others.
You didn't answer the question. If the bureaucrat wants this info, he'll get it through a third or fourth or X-th party. The root problem is that this data exists at all. Of course, if it didn't, half the posters here would be out of a job.
Frankly the CDC are the scariest people buying this data. They have direct power and authority to harm people and their livelihoods with little resistance possible and their head-honcho seriously believes his authority exceeds the supreme court.
the actual scary people would have the data locked up and be super secret about it. The non scary CDC employees would casually/accidentally leak it to other scary people because there is no reason to believe they are competent or care about security & privacy
This is an excellent use of the data, a proof that it is worthwhile for the data to exist, and a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy.
It actually sounds like the anonymization and aggregation was done pretty well for this. There's no such thing as 100% anonymity, but there are useful levels of anonymity.
The fact that we don't have a standardized way of blessing data with varying known levels of privacy, checked and enforced by law, is kind of ridiculous in 2022.
If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients.
I 100% agree that privacy is handled way, way too loosely in general, and this does look like the CDC was a lot more interested in a grab bag of use cases than it was with maintaining anonymity. But surely that's an indictment of our societal failure to regulate data brokers? It shouldn't be up to the CDC to act counter to their mission.
> If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients.
I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me.
> This is an excellent use of the data, a proof that it is worthwhile for the data to exist
The use of the data is fine, but as for the data existing, I also find that to be questionable (in its current form). The particular issue that I have is that the data is used without true consent, and as such is tainted.
OTOH, I suspect that "being OK with the CDC tracking your movements via GPS" would eliminate a very important cohort from the study.
Which brings me back to your original statement:
> a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy
I don't genuinely don't know that we can have both (informed consent) and (quality data).
>> If you want to maximize privacy here, then let's pass laws to prevent doctors from knowing the gender, age, and weight of any of their patients.
> I am fine with my doctor knowing this about me. I am not fine with any doctor who does not see me as a patient knowing anything at all about me.
I am ok with my doctor knowing there was a 12% chance that I broke curfew during a pandemic lockdown, given my zip code or whatever. I don't think it's a black and white thing. Especially since you can't have the extreme of no data—the data is already out there, in massive quantities, and mostly uncontrolled.
>> a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy
> I don't genuinely don't know that we can have both (informed consent) and (quality data).
Oh, we can't, not anywhere near the optimal balance anyway. Because people. (And therefore governments, and laws, and everything else.) But I guess I still think that whatever crappy balance we can come up with is better than organizations that can make good use out of collections like this sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending there's no way to know certain things that all the bad actors already know because they're willing to buy this stuff on the black market. It leads to dogs and cats living together and people writing really bad run-on sentences like the previous one.
Because, at least in my opinion, doctors should be considering base rates carefully. If I come in with an unusual set of symptoms, then I don't want to be tested for something that is vanishingly unlikely and not tested for something that has an unusually high frequency of occurring given my specific situation (demographic, race, vaccination rates in the community I live in for diseases that can produce my symptoms, etc.)
Medicine should not be one size fits all when better relevant data are available.
Different but related: I personally use similar information to determine the risk of various behaviors. Going to a meeting in someone's house where people won't be masked? Not a big deal if the current rate of community infection is very low in my local community. Playdate for my kids with friends who I know are not vaccinated for measles or pertussis or anything else? Depends on whether those are going around—and if they are, then I'd like to know how many kids are unvaccinated whether or not they're lying about it. If there's a way to get that aggregate information.
Running with the 12% figure, I'm still curious as to how that is useful. Have you traveled recently? Been to a large gathering? Never left your house? Visited with family from out of town? Do you commute for work as a front-line worker?
Risk profiles for less common diseases make sense, but these are questions your doctor should ask regardless of the infection rate of your zip code in a pandemic scenario, however.
> Medicine should not be one size fits all
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect tests for most obvious fit of your symptoms (with followups for less likely causes if those are negative) rather than needing to do statistics puzzles for every patient that comes in through the door.
I get that CDC is extremely interested in measuring effects of policy and PR.
What bothers me is how shady this is. Government shouldn't reach out to gray-area thugs for supply, and they should not try to keep their methods secret. Keep in mind public health authorities are absolutely dependent upon their reputation and track record. Having high trust is critical for ensuring voluntary compliance when shit hits the fan. They seem entirely unaware of this and operates more like an intelligence agency. Even if you're still trusting of CDC, can you at least see how these actions risk eroding that for others?
I totally hear you - this seems SUPER SHADY. But I think the truth is it's really not. These data brokers are totally legit - legally. And also pretty common. Cell companies cell this stuff all the time to just about anybody. They're not loud about it, and people frequently freak out when they realize it. But this stuff happens ALL THE TIME.
I also have heard that this has been a common technique amongst academic epidemiologists during the pandemic. Because it's actually all above board, and super useful.
Still sounds SUPER F*NG CREEPY. But it's commonplace.
>and a terrifying demonstration that we need to grow the hell up with respect to data privacy
Once again, "conspiracy theorists" were right. I'm beginning to think the governments of the world are reading them for ideas.
>The fact that we don't have a standardized way of blessing data with varying known levels of privacy, checked and enforced by law, is kind of ridiculous in 2022.
Sure, and then as soon as that happens, someone who has patented/copyrighted the process coincidentally is handed a government mandated empire worth millions in licensing fees. Look into ICD-10 codes if you need an example. It's the classic college professor scam where they write the textbook and force everyone to buy it.
>It shouldn't be up to the CDC to act counter to their mission.
If CDC can't do the job without violating 4th amendment, it shouldn't exist. It's not a "private company" and the bill of rights exists for a good reason.
This is commercial tracking data, not COVID app data. It's been well known for a long time that plenty of phone apps sell data to aggregators, it's not a conspiracy theory.
That commercial data isn't something any court would call a violation of the 4th amendment.
>Once again, "conspiracy theorists" were right. I'm beginning to think the governments of the world are reading them for ideas.
Right how? That private companies track every movement on your phone and that it's available on the market for anyone to purchase? We've spoken about that for years on HN, how is that a conspiracy theory? That's exactly what Apple has said publicly they want to fight.
This is not an excellent he just of the data. And the ways that cdc want to use it is proof the data shouldn't exist.
I don't have a problem with the CDC creating an app to collect such data. An app the clearly says what it is used for.
But to collect the data through some other so and decide if someone broke curfew or visited a neighbor? You think that is ok? Pretty much the definition of Big Brother
If they can identify individual people breaking curfew, then yes that's way out of line. If they can estimate the percentage of people breaking curfew within an entire large city, that seems like important policy input. And there's a huge gray area in between.
In actual fact, I'm not entirely comfortable with the "large city" granularity either. I don't want a city that is majority black to be treated differently using the excuse of their aggregated health data, for instance. I think these types of data collections need to be treated very seriously, requiring justification for specific uses, tracking where it lives and enforcing penalties when it shows up elsewhere. Because these data are going to be out there and used. If they aren't managed responsibly, they'll be sold on the black market and used in completely uncontrolled ways.
Doesn't the way they went about this have the same issue as the NSA, etc., going to the UK or other jurisdictions to get data on Americans when they can't legally obtain that data? If that is shady, then why isn't this also called out?
It looks like this is a method to circumvent the law.
Headline feels a little misleading, they didn’t track phones per se, they bought data from one of the dozens of cellphone data-brokers that continue to operate despite legislation and congressional action/in-action.
Importantly this didn't give them the easy ability to pinpoint individuals for not complying with lock down. The point is to know how impactful policies were
Exactly! We need real privacy legislation, with consent framed similarly to the EU's GDPR. Without some type of general reform, every little bit of outrage about how our personal information is being abused is just a surface distraction.
Furthermore with regards to the misleading headline, apart from a few counties in California there were no "lockdown orders" in the US. There were closed businesses [0], and there were suggestions that individuals stay home. There were no widespread orders with the force of law telling individuals that they must stay in their homes.
[0] who I feel for, especially when things like small hardware stores had to shut down while Home Depot could remain open.
I was totally ready to make a "CDC, go fuck yourself!" meme when I read the headline.
Now, I can't decide how I feel. As a researcher (and someone interested in human behavior generally), it would be interesting to know how people reacted to the various measures attempted during the pandemic. On the other hand, the federal government analyzing the movement patterns of individuals is creepy-as-hell.
I'm left feeling like the headline, its submission here, and a lot of the discussion is more about propaganda than a serious discussion of the merits of this type of research.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it is ethical. The CDC was acting unethically here, though I'm sure they feel everything they do is ethical because they are above question when performing their mission.
Okay but you can't take someone to court for being unethical-- and the government in my experience doesn't care much if you complain they're not ethical. So while I don't disagree I'm not sure what the effect of this actually is, if any
Pretty much every cellphone/app user dimension is available for a price on the open market. What you do think Facebook et.al, sells when an app user allows background tracking?
Is it unethical to study behavior of the populous? If anything bringing it into a clinical study probably brought more oversight in terms of ethical handling, and aggregation/anonymization of data than the source would provide.
Ads is just one of their businesses, consider FBLogin and 3rd party data-access e.g. full-name, date-of-birth, email address, friends, the list goes on...
I don't use FB, but don't you typically have to explicitly opt in to this kind of sharing?
There is a world of difference between that and companies you can't really opt out of doing business with if you want to live in mainstream society (cell providers, banks, etc.) making you click 'agree' on some 50k line dump of legalese and then selling granular, non-anonymous personal data to anyone willing to pay.
Frankly, the hysteria around "Big Tech" "selling your data" is misplaced and probably paid for by the lobbying arms of the real abusers. "Big Tech" is far from blameless, but it's a teddy bear compared to how other industries treat us.
I spent a couple of decades in big-tech, and of-that did adtech for about 5yrs - we captured, aggregated, cooked out activity streams from billions of toolbar, browser, and beacon events per day, for real-time, long and short-term user profiles for around a couple of hundred million people - primarily for feeding the ad-exchange behavioral targeted ads. Back then about 80% of the active internet users. This was a huge business even back then - billions.
Since then the world and his wife have captured data and inserted telemetry beacons everywhere. Consider how many services you use that are today subsidized by “anonymized” selling/trading/sharing/merging user event streams - the TV your watching, your cellphone provider selling user behaviour data, even your ISP is selling your DNS lookups - they’re all at it now. Worse, mobile has made it much easier to install platform frameworks that offer developer features in return for data-collection such as location, user profile etc.
I don’t think it’s overblown - that “anonymity” isn’t that anonymous when you add enough dimensions - you just haven’t seen how massive the data broker business is.
My point is that the companies usually referred to as "Big Tech", e.g. Google, FB, Apple, etc., are generally not the ones participating in this kind of unrestrained exchange of PII and sensitive personal data for money. They generally keep their user data on their own servers, and use it to power ad targeting platforms.
The things you are talking about (e.g. smart TVs, cell providers, ISPs) are the things I am saying are actually bad. For some reason they don't get nearly as much attention, despite being far worse.
How is the CDC's behavior here unethical? Every person involved has consented to everything involved. Just because you personally don't like it doesn't mean people aren't allowed to willingly give up their privacy. That's how freedom works.
I also take issue with the liberal use of the term "lockdown". As far as I can tell, the only thing close to a lockdown was issued for a time in San Francisco. Everyplace else just barred indoor gatherings. You could go outside as much as you pleased. And even businesses were open for takeout or reduced occupancy.
I got free academic access to this dataset. The data is anonymized and aggregated to the census block level (500 people). It does not allow for the kind of tracking that the article is fear mongering about.
The average census block has a population of 30 people. Millions of census blocks have a population of zero while millions more have a population of only a couple of people. Surely it must be at the census tract level or higher?
The CDC doing this (or any public agency for that matter) doesn't bother me, to be frank I think it's expected in order for them to make well-informed policy decisions.
What bothers me is that if this data is not anonymized properly then that's one really bad leak waiting to happen. For example: if someone has someone else's location patterns they can plan a robbery on their home at the optimal time.
Not only this, but I think that if we as a society are going to collect data en masse there has to be a legitimate opt out for the people who aren't interested. I think forcing blanket surveillance on everyone is just going to sew further trust issues down the road and a good compromise is letting people opt out, but providing additional services and conveniences if they opt in.
I knew this was happening at the time, and I contacted several people generally past my level of influence, to tell them.
The significant first paragraphs here show, not only is this a PR effort, but noting US Constitution protected places (churches), intimate family ties (school) and by law, other sovereign nations (First People lands in North America) show to me, a non-lawyer, that there is going to be a serious penalty sought legally by someone, somehow.
I say, nail these companies to the wall. The industry was bursting at the seams to sell this, with super-fancy data viz eye-candy ala Palantir and crew. There is lust for this, not just the money. Mapbox I am looking at you.
I was involved with this. SafeGraph data is aggregated to the CBG level and has differential privacy applied.
You don’t have to guess. The data is self-serve purchasable from their website so you can go take a look at what it looks like. Go find a blog post of theirs and you’ll get a coupon code so you’re not paying and then you can look at what the data looks like.
You better rip out your TPMS since those can be tracked. Same with anything that has bluetooth since those are widely tracked on highways for monitoring traffic flows. Oh and license plate readers, not sure how you block those. Can you live a cash only life as well since credit cards are obviously tracked. Do you own a home? Is it in your name or did you set up an LLC to purchase it? I'm not trying to be a jerk, just that I've had the same thoughts as you and just realized it's impossible.
There are acceptable steps to take in order to remove yourself and some of your data from the things you disagree with, but just because you can't reach step 10 right now, doesn't mean you should take step 1.
In a world where being the wrong kind of skin colour can consistently get you pulled over and harassed for a 'broken tail light' and 'smelling weed in the car', it takes a lot of social privilege to think that driving around with an unreadable license plate is a workable solution.
Come to New York City where every 3rd car on the road has an illegal paper license plate or no license plate at all and then get back to me about "social privilege".
TPMS is fairly difficult to track. You need to be either very close (inches/feet) or have a very high gain antenna (which means you have to aim it, can't get signals from every direction) plus they don't transmit continuously.
I recommend getting a rtl-sdr and playing around with rtl_433. It will probably change your mind about needing to be very close to things.
Even with the small antenna these devices come with, I can pickup TPMS signals from the cars on the nearby streets, and that's with the antenna indoors.
If you use an android, you can set it so that it does location just off GPS which is a lot less precise and doesn't seem to update as often. The other day I went downtown for a ballgame, sushi after, and then home, and the only place it picked me up for the day was the light rail station when I bought my ticket early that afternoon
Effectively leaving it at home? Once you unwrap it at your destination, haven't you not only given up your travel history (maybe not to an intermediate location), but also flagged yourself as someone that is hiding something?
I guess my point is, you can't hide yourself from the government this way. From some random third party, sure.
>Effectively leaving it at home? Once you unwrap it at your destination, haven't you not only given up your travel history (maybe not to an intermediate location), but also flagged yourself as someone that is hiding something?
For me the utility in having a cell phone is the convenience. If my car breaks down or if I get a page on my 1-way pager that I deem important enough to call back then giving a random datapoint of my location is a conscious decision that I can make. This is vastly different than creating and offering up a record of everywhere I go to the government, the phone company and all of the 3rd parties along the way that hoover up my info as I pass by.
>but also flagged yourself as someone that is hiding something?
Or someone that values their privacy.
>I guess my point is, you can't hide yourself from the government this way.
The government can track you with satellites, helicopters or simply park someone outside your house and follows you every time you go out if they so choose, and there isn't much you can do about it. What you can do is refuse to voluntarily input all of your movements and activities into a massive database that can be accessed, retrieved and data-mined at will.
In Australia the government freely admitted to using mobile phone tracking and tower 'pings' to determine lockdown compliance, the state of Victoria at one point using the data to justify extending a lockdown in Melbourne.
Is there actually ways to use GPS data that is anonymous? Like could there be zero knowledge proofs to draw correlations without revealing actual location data? We've clearly seen that aggregating data is not enough. But I'm wondering if there is actually a form of strong anonymity that is possible when dealing with GPS data. To me GPS data seems the most concerning with user tracking.
The only way to make this data a liability would be to create consequences for its possession or dissemination.
In the financial sector, I feel like a lot of really good progress has been made with regard to creating artificial forces that strongly encourage proper behavior around PII and other sensitive data. Just take a look at PCI-DSS for a good example of the lengths you could go to in order to protect a customer's assets and/or identity.
This was mentioned in April 2020 ish and no one blinked an eye. It was showing how much people left their houses, how far out did they travel to, did they participate in entertainment venues, did they eat out etc.
The data was never used for enforcement purposes. (if it was.. it wasn't very efficient at all)
I might be in the minority, but I don’t care if it was used to make macoroni art.
I also don’t care how harmless or good the CDC might be to someone. A government entity should not be a using tax payer money to purchase privacy sensitive data of citizens.
For anything other than a disease prevention and tracking agency (debatiable if the CDC follows into that.. insert Dr Glockenflocken video about that for reference) I agree with you. Enforcement agencies like the FBI shouldn't be getting that info to work with.
With dieases similar to covid, measles, etc .. it's an invaluable tool to be able to determine how, and where infection occured. This allowed for some fantastic studies and finds in Korea. (I.e. https://jkms.org/DOIx.php?id=10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e415 would not have been possible without the phone data)
I've worked with the Safegraph data mentioned in the article. They draw a polygon around a set of geographic coordinates and tell you how many iPhones vs Androids we're in that polygon in a week and they associate that polygon+address with a named business. Yes, that polygon could be a doctor's office as the article raises but so what? There is nothing tying it to you/me/any person. It's a location-popularity index basically. I have a hard time coming up with a scenario where this is a threat to my liberty. The article especially at the end conflates tracking of persons with tracking of popularity, and is (imho) disappointingly fear-mongering.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of how much of the location data SafeGraph/Veraset gets is from "free" apps that commoditize developers when they integrate various advertising APIs.
How do these companies onboard apps, they always seem super vague about that.
I understand the model, they provide a tracking sdk that app developers embed in their apps and get paid for. But I haven’t found any actual documentation on these sdk’s. Do they buy the apps themselves or reach out directly somehow?
Yea, this data isn’t really anonymized. Draw a circle around your house, and simple algorithms for mobility data can detect and follow all patterns of life around, to & from your house.
Most people don’t realize mobility data even exists. Let alone what you can do with it.
So are the 3 US carriers all selling customer location data to SafeGraph then? I'm assuming that's the only source of SafeGraph’s data? I'm guessing there is no opt-out for this either just like the other sleazy data brokers.
Our institutions are ancient, with overly specific missions. Like doctors, we have some for feet, for spine, for brain, but very few that integrate everything and see the big picture.
When things get complicated these narrow-minded institutions will fail us.
I'm on a Pixel and Google Fi, no such thing happened to me. Are there other entities that might have hand their hand in this? (State, Telco, phone manufacturer)
Maybe they are referring to the “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications” setting.
Im using a Pixel too, and you can see the toggle if you go to Settings, then select Google.
Mine is toggled off, and I don’t really know he details of how it works, but it seems like you need to download some official COVID reporting app to enable it.
You probably have it, but it's just a feature. In this case, it's a default-off feature that allows contact tracing in a particular region if you actively choose to enable that.
Google ships features to my phone with every major update. This is just one more--completely opt-in--feature.
> Google is constantly tracking your every move by default without you turning anything on.
They are. And you decided to take issue with a default-off feature instead. Of all the tracking features your phone has, this one seems like the least creepy. It's not like they're "asking consent" for every other feature they ship.
If anyone were in a position to know whether it’s possible, and how to do it, he’d be on the list.
I think, regardless of his history regarding open source, water under the bridge long ago, he is worth taking seriously if we want to be prepared for the next one, which may come soon.
There was probably a window in time when cases were less than a few thousand or so when such a thing could have been possible. That's the real game in fighting emerging diseases. Early detection, identification of reservoirs and rapid vaccine development and aggressive isolation and ring vaccination if possible.
But I agree, it's absolutely laughable to think enforced social distancing could ever control a fully airborne disease, already so widespread, and with an R_0 over 4, especially now with the current rate of emergence of immunity escaping variants. Check out BA.4 and BA.5 in south africa right now, both of which seem to elude immunity from BA.1 just 6 months after Omicron's emergence.
Sure, it would have originally been rational to try to contain it until widespread vaccination could happen. That was no longer an option as soon as:
(a) Trump decided that his followers should treat it by injecting bleach, fish tank cleaner, and horse dewormer
(b) the WHO and the CDC decided it wasn't an airborne disease because apparently they were still relying on research from 1949 C.E.
(c) the CDC decided not to tell Americans that masks were effective (because they didn't want panic buying)
(d) Biden's COVID czar decided to ostrich the whole thing
Now we're just fucked; everyone will get it, the question is how many times and how bad the next variants. And whether we'll ever develop effective treatment for long covid.
The cat was long already out of the bag at all of those points.
There's a small chance it could have been contained in late 2019 when Wuhan doctors were raising the alarm, but they were silenced and punished by Chinese government officials
That's the thing though. Things like SARS and MERS still exist in the animal reservoirs and could come back at any time. It never hit pandemic or even endemic levels. It's easy to eradicate something in a small geographic area with a small group if people. And you're right, the severity made it much harder for infections to be missed (I think it was less contagious too).
I was just saying that now something has hit pandemic level, it's unlikely we can make it go away. If we're lucky it will end up like the Spanish flu - people build immunity to the current strain during a few years and it mutates to something less severe.
I'm not sure we can, even if we try. At least not for any practical cost. Canada has been trying to curtail, and ideally eradicate, rabies from the wild for the last ~50 years. Rabid animals are systematically culled. There's an oral animal vaccine. There's an ongoing vaccination program where they scatter the vaccine all over the place in edible treat format. The ongoing cost of these programs is considerable, running to hundreds of millions of dollars.
And yet rabies has not been eliminated from the wild. Not by a long shot. The cumulative effect of these programs over the decades is to mostly eradicate it from inhabited areas in foxes, raccoons and other species which are prone to human interaction. Actual eradication of rabies in the wild in North America, is essentially unattainable, even if we scaled current programs up massively. Too many skunks slip through the net. Unless we're going to simply sterilize the outdoors, I'm really not sure we could eradicate animal reservoirs for COVID-19.
From a public health standpoint this is a great dataset. There are papers that show no correlation between lockdowns and covid spread, but this can show if the lockdown orders were actually followed.
> perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation
>"The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021."
What business does the CDC have with Monitoring for local curfews? Wouldn't curfew monitoring be more the purview of local law enforcement more so than the remit of national health agency. Further did the US actually have hard curfews anywhere?
It’s a public health data decision. If people were not listening to local requests to stay home, that tells you that this is an ineffective policy.
If you tell people “don’t go to weddings” and people are still going to convention centers you know something is wrong with your method of intervention.
Location tracking is a huge business and honestly CDC is probably the actor we should be least concerned about in that marketplace. I think the real story is the commodification of our physical presence and the resulting surveillance capitalism models it further enables and normalizes.
Definitely true and I'm of the same mind. Which is why I'm dissuading readers from unnecessary moral outrage over petty, inconsequential matters like this, and encourage everyone to think deeper about technology's role in our lives.
I'm going to preface my argument here with a statement that I think this kind of use by the CDC is appropriate given their mission and stated goals. It will absolutely help them figure out possible future models of population compliance with types of orders and restrictions.
That said, this kind of thing does seem like it has the potential to effectively be an end run around needing a warrant to do this kind of tracking on an individual basis. If it's not allowed for the government to track any particular person without a warrant but they can just buy the tracking data from a brokerage and claim "we didn't do the tracking" - that's a bit problematic to say the least.
I do agree with other posters though that the real crux of it here is that this kind of data should be illegal to have on its own anyways UNLESS ordered by a court to collect it for the purposes of a warrant.
Good point. I think the real value of this story is not that this data is readily available, but that the government is also consuming it - which most people (rightly!) have a problem with. If that's the wake up call it takes to make people pay attention to just how bad "surveillance capitalism" is, then I'm all for it.
Because they're an organization which is still bound by public laws and social norms, whereas the real sinister use of our location data goes entirely unnoticed and is far, far more insidious than will ever be printed in the subservient press.
Are they? Didn't they somehow unilaterally suspend rent payments for the entire US, even though that is well outside their granted authority? And what social norms did lockdowns involve, exactly?
A federal judge vacated the nationwide freeze on evictions that was put in place and the lockdowns were not merely the result of US health officials conspiring. Your criticism of the CDC is valid but I believe it is misguided; the manufactured moral outrage I'm speaking about distracts us from the real abuses of power happening behind the veil, and they are far more shocking than what is reported here.
I mean maybe. The CDC is just an outlet or a tool that was appropriate at the time. I'm sure they didn't come up with the eviction moratorium on their own, they were told to do that, or at least it was authorized by another group. They also knew it would be overturned because they have legal council.
Just because it's the CDC doesn't mean there aren't strings moving the arms about.
"The principle of a court overruling a public health judgment by a qualified organization like the CDC is disturbing in the precedent that it might send.”
The whole opinion of roe v Wade was predicated on the fact the government had no right to people's health information:
> In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in McCorvey's favor ruling that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's right to choose whether to have an abortion.
Now we have vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and CDC surveillance.
>The whole opinion of roe v Wade was predicated on the fact the government had no right to people's health information
The Due Process violation is not about government right to health information. It's about the govt not being able to deprive people of things without due process.
These must not be a federal thing, because I still don't really know what people mean by this. Is it a state thing?
> and CDC surveillance
Private surveillance that the CDC and anyone else can buy. I agree that collecting this info in the first place, let alone selling it, should be very, very illegal.
There are ways around it (as there are with Covid vaccine requirements), but most folks are subject to vaccine mandates for school attendance (though, sure, those are state-level rules). IIRC I had to provide vaccination records for college, too. Plenty of states require vaccination to teach in a school (so, to hold a job).
What's different about this isn't the presence of mandates, but that it was a novel virus so mandates were applied to (a small set of) adults rather than mainly to kids.
In fact, the set of people to whom Covid vaccine mandates apply is surely way smaller than the set to whom a variety of others do. I'm pretty sure most states aren't requiring Covid vaccination for school attendance, for instance.
And they wonder why silly conspiracy theories gain traction in the public?
Honestly this is the dumbest thing to do in secret. The CDC was supposed to be apolitical and gave that up entirely during the pandemic, and now it appears they are quite horrible at politics.
> The CDC was supposed to be apolitical and gave that up entirely during the pandemic
If the politicians politicize a pandemic, and the CDC's job is to fight disease, then anything the CDC does becomes political by definition. Seems like that's on the politicians.
They made a FOIA request and got the procurement documents which lists use cases such as "Examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation" and monitoring "places of worship" both of which have extremely negative connotations.
This sort of dataset gets used in all kinds of twisted ways that aren't limited to footnotes on cute graphs.
This is the problem with you Wikipedia Wise Men. The only knowledge you have is what you were told about. Your position is literally just the last “article” you read. All this shit is either in MMWRs or on preprint sites. It’s not “secret” beyond the basic fact that lots of hypotheses are studied constantly.
What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway political opinion, and other less than stellar purposes.