It's kind of far down in the page so I missed it the first time I scanned it.
"We are working around the clock to finalise our protocol reference documents and reference implementation, to open source what we have built, so that others may deploy their own flavours of TraceTogether - each implementing the BlueTrace protocol. We appreciate your patience in the meantime."
I feel like this would be a lot easier and have a higher rate of usage/compliance if our tech companies actually worked with people to release or opt-into sharing this information for when it's necessary (information which is already secretly shared with governments for security).
For the majority of people if they go to https://www.google.com/maps/timeline they'll have a tracker of everywhere they've visited and the time they were in each location.
If you could take people's accounts who've been infected and give them the ability to opt-into sharing this information you could have a pretty good source of information about the locations where they dwelled for long periods of time and who should go into self-isolation.
I don't think anyone trusts Google enough. They can help by providing governments with anonymized data they already have. Immediately what comes to mind is identifying to governments public hot spots while lockdowns are supposed to be going on so that they can send people to disperse the gatherings. I'm sure people can come up with better ideas
I don’t in my case because I’m not comfortable with the commercial information that gives Google.
One of the gestures I think Google could make in this fight is to allow people to opt into that data sharing on a strictly limited basis. I’d opt in if it was only going to be provided for the purposes of medical infection contact tracing while this pandemic is rife.
If this gets any sort of public traction it'll be built in to shop doorways, public transport, police cars, and street lights within a couple of months.
Yeah, in a new york minute. This is already built into iOS in their newer Find My Phone. The carriers also know who and where we are just need to add in covid testing data. The problem is that even if it is decentralized and OSS, then the average user can't/won't install it. If it is simple and easy (centralized), then it becomes a honey pot for the government.
You can't, but apparently Find My Phone uses Bluetooth to find nearby phones and thats the same technology that Bluetooth contact tracing for coronavirus would use.
This is needlessly cynical. TraceTogether uses client-side logging so as to leave data in the hands of the users up until it's actually needed for contact tracing.
Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Otherwise, apps may go a long way to improve the speed and accuracy of contact tracing. Here in the US, I'd much rather use a protocol like TraceTogether's Bluetrace that goes out of its way to preserve privacy, than adopt an actually-privacy-violating centralized approach where the government simply gathers everyone's location data and processes it centrally (Israel's approach, for example).
Cynical for sure, don't know about that "needlessly" given it's an endless fight where everytime you give up a right it's taken away forever. This time they give you the opensource bit, next time it's "a matter of emergency", then they stop asking and just punish you if you don't comply.
>Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
I have never said that so I am not sure what to tell you. The only method that works is quarantine, remote control is a copout to address the lack of contact with the population. Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone.
> Israel's approach for example
On this topic, Israel tech companies are right now sending out business proposals to the Italian government to try and implement their methods (viz. https://www.ilgazzettino.it/nordest/primopiano/coronavirus_z... last thing Europe needs during this crysis is ANOTHER political mindset shift towards walls and a iron boot.
Literally nobody in the epi community believes that. Would you please state your credentials, or cite a credible source for that statement? (For the opposite, please do read takes from Trevor Bedford, Mark Lipsitch, Carl Bergstrom, Andy Slavitt or really pretty much anybody in the field)
We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool. As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
Yes, there are privacy concerns. Work on them. Address them. But blanket statements like "only quarantine works" are extremely detrimental to public health efforts - the last thing you want is an "all or nothing" mindset
> We (the US) are currently in a state were suppression is the only prudent tool
How do you know that this is the current state?
> As SK has shown, contact tracing & testing help a lot once you're not completely inundated by cases (and actually have a meaningful supply of equipment)
"meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?
Look at the number of cases and their regional distribution, realize that those are tested cases and thus, with a) asymptomatic carriers and b) really bad testing in the US, the number of active cases is at least 10x that. Then realize you're dealing with an exponential process. United States are thoroughly infected already.
> "meaningful supply of equipment" means this option is not possible in the US?
Not now, but if and when the US implements proper suppression measures, and the number of cases goes down to manageable levels (while at the same time the supply chain of PPE catches up to demand), then the supply of equipment will be meaningful.
I guess i misunderstood surpression. Thought surpression is the early stages and not when you have been thouroughly infected already.
"meaningful supply" was in the context of avoiding a lockdown and hence i don't undrestand your answer. if you don't have the equipment now, how do you avoid the lockdown and make the levels go down without large quantities of dead people?
I'm not an epidemiologist, or an MD, so with a large grain of salt:
Containment: Testing & contact tracing - you try to contain the disease before it widely spreads. Usually one of the early stages of fighting.
Mitigation: You can't contain any more, and you're trying to slow down the progress to avoid a large peak. Test & treat those with severe symptoms, encourage people with mild symptoms to stay home, encourage people to keep distance.
Suppression: Things have hit the fan. You need to drastically halt the progress of the epidemic. This is shelter-in-place, lockdown, quarantine etc. #staythefuckhome has become a bit more mandatory. That's pretty much where we are right now. You want to drastically reduce the number of infections in a short amount of time.
"Meaningful supply" was in the context of suppression actually taking hold. At some point, you're hopefully down to illness levels where containment or mitigation make sense again. But for that to happen, you need tests, you need PPE, you need infrastructure so you actually can contain. We're at suppression/lockdown because we failed at that the first time round.
So, it's not about avoiding the lockdown now.
The goal is lockdown now to prevent catastrophic overload and buy time to get supplies in place for later containment stages.
Hope that clarifies?
But, of course, containment is not guaranteed to work, so we might be cycling back and forth between those measures
The point of contact tracing is to find out who to quarantine, so you don’t have to lock down the entire population. It’s not a “copout,” it’s the bread and butter of epidemic mitigation. It’s why most of them don’t get to this point.
>But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.[..] But we are at this point already.
Singapore isn't. (the government that is building this app). Neither is Taiwan. Through a combination of contact tracing, surveillance, national health databases and enforcing compliance of quarantined individuals by for example regularly checking in on them they have been able to both contain the spread of the disease and keep a reasonable amount of economic and social life intact.
I will continue to be mystified by this weird and abstract notion of privacy that keeps others away from my data but results in mass lockdown, quarantines, shutdowns and curfews, while people in Singapore give some data to authorities and they can still go out and live their lives. I want material freedom to buy groceries and go to work, not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy while some plague wreaks havoc and I need to haul up in my apartment for months.
Even without that, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea all have a no joke civil service. Them being able to come up with something in the time of crisis fast is a consequence of that, not the other way around.
Even if one or two piecemeal measures like that were to be implemented, it will not change the fact of terrific ineptitude of current, and few previous office holders.
Without fixing that first, you will never get to the level of trust needed for the society to function, and not to fall apart upon first serious crisis.
In comparison to East Asia, North America is a very uneventful place, where the apparatus of state has not been truly stress tested in decades. For every Katrina USA had, countries in Asia have like 20, and having non-idiots in the office is much more of an existential need.
Even in a patently broken country like PRC, it's the response to natural disasters which is the only thing that really tickles the CPC when it comes to public anger.
> I will continue to be mystified ... people in Singapore give some data to authorities and they can still go out and live their lives. I want material freedom ... not some sort of religious dogmatic privacy ...
For what it's worth, I think open source, opt-in, decentralized, user controlled contact tracing such as that being discussed above is about as good a solution as we can hope for in such a situation.
That being said, I think you've completely failed to understand why some people respond the way they do. Their concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but rather civil liberties in the long term. Quarantines will necessarily be lifted, but government surveillance has a nasty tendency not to go away. More generally, civil liberties are permanently lost with a disturbing consistency no matter how temporary the original intent.
Nobody out there is either fully informed or perfectly rational, so it's important to understand the underlying motivations behind other's viewpoints if you want to get anywhere. I'm certainly dissatisfied by the incredible ineptitude the US has displayed, but I also value my civil liberties highly and wouldn't want to live in Taiwan. Make of that what you will.
> Their concerns aren't about freedom in the short term, but rather civil liberties in the long term.
What's interesting to me is that with the right institutions, surveillance does not actually even diminish one's right to qualified privacy.
It can be illegal to use identifiable data for various purposes, or illegal to use identifiable data in a non-fiduciary manner.
With respect to abuses of the surveillance power, it can be employed against those in power as well, to prevent abuses of their power. e.g. police bodycam can work against abusive police if the laws should support it.
So it's important to see surveillance as a sword that needs proper laws to use responsibly, that allows a society with proper laws to obtain better freedom from actual harm and also a better quality of life. If we should just bury our heads as the technology materializes, the abusers will be the ones to exploit surveillance infrastructure.
In cautionary tales like Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or in the design of the Panopticon, the surveillance power was in the hands of a large power, not themselves held accountable by surveillance. But with the right laws, a citizenry can hold a government accountable and limit government and powerful offices by surveillance. These tales fail to see the how surveillance can help strengthen egalitarian institutions. They were more concerned with demonstrating just how powerful surveillance is, a reasonable point, than with how it could be employed to reinforce egalitarian institutions.
I find it pathetic that people wail to the high heavens about this abstract concept of privacy you mention and pensively quote Benjamin Franklin, while clicking away all their most intimate shit to check out some stupid Facebook game.
Get your priorities right: “you won’t believe...” clickbait no. Contact tracing to stop a disease that turns your lungs to frothy blood-juice. Fuck yes
> while clicking away all their most intimate shit to check out some stupid Facebook game.
That doesn't describe me, that describes the straw man your require to be at ease with your own choices, which in turn is the only signal in your comment.
Stay at home is the mantra, but because there is zero enforcement of it, there's no shortage of stupid people coughing in grocery stores, or visiting out-of-state relatives, or fleeing the epidemic centers, bringing the virus into rural communities.
Lockdown buys time to introduce new measures. Those measures are:
1. Quarantining positive individuals.
2. Physically enforcing that quarantine. The honor system doesn't work. People are very clearly not obeying voluntary quarantine.
3. Contact tracing, and testing of everyone that positive individuals have interacted with.
Once we get a system that can handle 1, 2, and 3 in place, we can lift the lockdown. This is how Korea and Singapore are beating the virus. This is how China's going to be lifting their lockdown.
That doesn't mean we have to be forever. Extreme distancing / lockdown will be needed to get the outbreaks under control, but once that point is reached, extensive testing and contact tracing will be needed to relax those measures without triggering a massive resurgence, unless we want to wait a year or more for a vaccine.
> But "stay at home" has been a mantra for weeks anyway, with everybody acting as if they and everyone else is infected.
That's because every single Western country has fucked up the handling of initial stages of the pandemic. Everyone has seen what's going on in China and then Italy, and we all ended up on the spectrum of doing too little, too late (US in particular is leading here).
"Stay at home", social distancing, closing up businesses - those are suppression strategies. They're meant to shut the virus spread down. But they don't have to last all the way until the vaccine - if the number of cases and infection rate go down enough, these measures can be lifted - and then contact tracing can be used to do local quarantines and shutdowns with surgical precision, ensuring most people can live their daily lives as if no pandemic was happening.
> Moreover, what I am addressing is how the tracking is NEVER going to go away even after the emergency is gone.
Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed?
The way I see it is so long as there is a pandemic we have no freedom anyway. It might seem like tracking your citizens is infringing a freedom, but if the option is house arrest I don’t mind.
Any government that would be ready to monitor everyone all the time for no obvious reason isn’t democratic. I trust my government because I live in a functioning democracy. I wouldn’t trust the Chinese government, or even the Hungarian one, and I‘d have second thoughts about trusting the US govt to do the right thing. But most democracies should be able to use technology to provide more freedom in this situation, not less.
It’s a true test of a democracy to do this right. But not trying of fear of a perpetual big brother society I think is the wrong choice.
> Wouldn’t people just stop using any tracking applications once there is no tracking needed?
There's a risk that once the capacity is tried and tested, governments and private companies alike will try to make it enticing and useful for different means. The role of privacy activists should be nipping all these follow-up ideas in the bud. Ensuring that emergency measures are used only during actual emergencies. But not fighting them in situations like this.
I completely agree. To that end, it actually seems like fully decentralized client side contract tracking would be a useful technology to have a set of government supported open specifications for. Building the functionality into the OS, securely encrypting (no key escrow!) with a user supplied password, and requiring a warrant to seize (but good luck without the password) would proactively enable a robust response to future pandemics.
Actually I suppose this matches my view on location histories. I like them as an idea, but current implementations exfiltrate all the data off of my device which bothers me to no end.
I share the feeling. I want my phone to collect data about me and my environment. But I want to own that data and use it for myself, not have it sent out to some third parties.
Israel already moved from a central system to a different one called Hamagen which is not centralised and keeps the privacy of the people. This is the one they recommend for Italy. It is open source so you can verify it yourself.
https://github.com/MohGovIL/hamagen-react-native
Wasn't the same said after 9/11 and the patriot act? I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think several three letter agencies would use the provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all communications? You can't just accuse people of being conspiracy theorists over and over again and tell them that this time would be different because... Reasons? Also, who needs martial law when you can just do the same with duly passed laws?
There is no right to fly. There was a right to privacy (at least as argued before the supreme court) and I think it could be said that is revoked because of the three-letter-agencies data collection that was justified by 9/11.
> I'd guess it was just a tin foil hat conspiracy to think several three letter agencies would use the provisions from the patriot act to track pretty much all communications?
It was and still is. How do you believe this nonsense?
Also, several provisions from the Patriot Act haven't been renewed, so your example proves my point.
Sorry, but we are long past the point of calling out privacy advocates as "tinfoil hat wearers" - just look at everything that came out after Snowden. Beforehand, most people would have derided others for mentioning "such conspiracy nonsense" (I likely would have myself), and yet the truth was wilder than even hard-core, paranoid conspiracy theorists could have dreamt up.
Since 9/11 in particular, the Western world has seen constant attempts to increase mass surveillance, lower the burden of proof, and dampen human rights, always in the name of whatever they have the public most fearful of at the time - drugs, terrorists, paedos, criminals, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, communists, Islam, foreigners taking our jobs, the boogey man de jour.
I'm absolutely certain that we'll see politicians try to use coronavirus as an excuse for their Orwellian schemes.
Business as usual has come after Snowden; that's the reason people who have a default-antagonistic reaction to any new technology that could be employed by a government for tracking get labeled "tinfoil-hat wearers."
The future of society isn't no surveillance. That's not tractable. Genie's out of the bottle (as this release of a population tracking tool as open source demonstrates). The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live with it.
I can't disagree with that; honestly, it felt like the media and politicians conspired to bury it. Revelation after revelation was made after outlets like The Intercept went through the evidence, yet hardly anything made the mainstream news, and when it did, it was fleeting. The CIA destroyed evidence and lied to congress, but there was little impact.
> The question isn't how to stop it; it's how to live with it
This I disagree with. We've been shown that the supposedly "benevolent" Western governments of today can't be trusted with laws that permit over-arching mass surveillance and the dampening of civil liberties and human rights, and we've seen the inevitable creeping escalations - who knows what a worse government of tomorrow might do?
How do you propose a XXI-century technologically advanced society can do to ensure its biosafety? The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful. Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to individuals and small groups. Society needs a defense to compensate. Biology is particularly nasty here, as it's self-replicating.
Quite honestly, I'm increasingly starting to believe that privacy has been on borrowed time ever since we discovered DNA. That doesn't mean all privacy is going to be gone; just that to survive, societies need to learn how to handle pandemics very swiftly, and that seems to require large-scale, real-time management.
> The current pandemic is force majeure, the next one might be accidental, the one after that purposeful
Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism. If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety.
> Advancement of science and technology in large parts means making more and more potentially destructive power available to individuals and small groups
You are implying that individuals could release a bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this is pure alarmism, and absolutely not what we need right now. I don't doubt that politicians will soon be making similar arguments in a grab for more power, but please, don't give them ideas!
> How do you propose...
I'm not in the medical field, so I don't have a proposal. But as a human being, I personally don't see how mass surveillance is the answer, especially so given we can't trust our governments with such tools.
I don't doubt that the WHO and experts from across the globe will be making plans to more rapidly contain future outbreaks. I'm certainly interested to learn more about such plans when they exist though.
> Being honest, I don't think there is any need for such alarmism.
Looks at JHU map... I think there is.
> If anything, this pandemic has demonstrated that a viral bioweapen could ensure MAD just as well as the nuclear variety.
A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish. It's a domain of mad men.
> You are implying that individuals could release a bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this is pure alarmism, and absolutely not what we need right now.
I'm implying that small groups could do it now, and individuals perhaps a decade for now. Biohacking has been a thing for a while now, and the main limiting factor is still that a) most people are sane, b) this is still difficult and you're more likely to give yourself diarrhea than weaponize a pathogen.
> I don't doubt that the WHO and experts from across the globe will be making plans to more rapidly contain future outbreaks. I'm certainly interested to learn more about such plans when they exist though.
Contact tracing seems like a no-brainer here. Great payoff for relatively little effort.
> A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish. It's a domain of mad men.
Maybe I misunderstood you then - you said "the one after that purposeful". Based on your latest comment, I guess this was in relation to small groups or individuals, not governments.
> Contact tracing seems like a no-brainer here. Great payoff for relatively little effort
OK, we have common ground here :) I fully agree that contact tracing is essential when a new and dangerous virus is discovered. Where I think we differ is the means to that end.
> I guess this was in relation to small groups or individuals, not governments.
Yup, I meant primarily small groups. Coarse-level bioweapons have bad payoff for governments - they're as likely to harm the attacker as the target. A targeted weapon, hurting only a specific group of people, would be more useful for a government, but it's still risky business - pathogens tend to mutate rather fast. I'm more worried about the crazy people that have a grudge and/or a point to make, and no regard for their own safety.
> Where I think we differ is the means to that end.
It's really, really hard to do contact tracing without some form of surveillance / keeping track of people's whereabouts. Systems that could streamline existing data collection end up giving similar data to what this app would.
> Johns Hopkins University, in particular their map here
OK, we're fully agreed that covid-19 is extremely serious, my disagreement is your belief that biological warfare is readily available to small groups or individuals.
> my disagreement is your belief that biological warfare is readily available to small groups or individuals
As a counterexample, have you considered that much of the cutting edge biological research takes place in academic labs? The vast majority of those would fit the definition of a small group, and many of the projects they undertake are conducted by only one or two individuals. The level of expertise required and difficulty of learning the material are the main barriers to entry for outsiders.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the discovery of CRISPR a few years ago means that gene drives are more accessible than ever. I'm not sure if it will be feasible to defend against them at all for the foreseeable future.
All the more reasons for being able to deploy swift and heavy biosafety measures at a moment's notice. But I didn't want to go into that territory, because a) I don't want to sound too alarmist, and b) I'm not very confident about what is vs. what isn't possible with CRISPR-based workflows in terms of bioweapons.
> A viral bioweapon is like trying to enact MAD by being the only ones with nukes and threatening to nuke everyone including yourself unless others do as you wish.
Someone with a viral bioweapon will develop it together with a vaccine. They will let only their people and allies have the vaccine, ensuring it is distributed secretly ahead of time, and wipe out everyone else.
Or possibly use it for blackmail: surrender everything to us, and those of you still left alive will be spared.
I'm worried that bioweapons at present levels of technology/understanding of science are just too risky for sane people to deploy. Even if a vaccine was paired with a pathogen, the risk of mutation making the vaccine irrelevant is too high.
Therefore, I'd expect one to be developed by some suicidal crazies with a grudge, who also won't have a particular need for a vaccine.
> You are implying that individuals could release a bioweapon upon the world - sorry, but again I think this is pure alarmism, and absolutely not what we need right now.
Honestly, it's not alarmist at this point and it's not just limited to bioweapons. A whole host of chemicals such as dimethylmercury exist and could potentially be weaponized.
Science and technology advance relentlessly; at some point we will have to figure out how to apply our new capabilities to achieve surveillance without the dystopian part. Unfortunately, current political processes don't lend themselves to this.
> A whole host of chemicals such as dimethylmercury exist and could potentially be weaponized.
For context, quoting from Wikipedia:
"The acute toxicity of the compound was demonstrated by the death of heavy metal chemist Karen Wetterhahn, who died 10 months after a single exposure of only a few drops permeated through her disposable latex gloves."
Which reminds me of another, bit more common, chemical: hydrofluoric acid. It's a nasty substance that - in low enough concentration - can penetrate your skin, killing cells on its way to the bones, and disrupt the work of internal organs, with symptoms only visible after hours have passed.
Not to scare people too much, but the last 100 years have given us a tremendous amount of tools to do harm, a lot of which are available to smart and determined enough individuals. At this point it's evident that the reason humanity hasn't already self-destructed is that most people aren't crazy maniacs and don't want to kill (at least not at random). Bioweapons are particularly nasty here because they self-replicate. It's not like with nuclear weapons, where the limiting factor is that the infrastructure necessary to weaponize fission material is affordable only for state-level actors. For bioweapons, all you need is base pathogen, some (arguably expensive) lab equipment, and a smart enough crazy.
I don't think the issue went away because anyone conspired to bury it. I think the issue went away because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data. They either don't get that these tools could be used against them by unethical government agents or they know that possibility exists but they trust the checks and balances against it and think the risk is outweighed by the benefit to law enforcement and the national intelligence community in managing the international threat of global terrorist activity (which, itself, leverages modern communications tools to communicate rapidly, move rapidlt, hide from law enforcement and military powers, etc.).
9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later.
> I think the issue went away because, on average, Americans are comfortable with the arrangement that the intelligence agencies have broad power to dragnet data
It's not just the US, it's the whole of the Western world. The UK in particular has been very complicit with the US in their joint mass surveillance.
The threat of terrorist activity in the west is vanishingly low, and IMO, is partially driven by western foreign policy. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the disgusting, utterly horrifying organised torture program the CIA has undertaken at "black sites" has certainly not helped (I doubt since an organised horror has taken place since the Nazis).
> 9/11 was an avoidable attack and a failure of information analysis; the information needed to stop it existed but had not been consolidated. A lot of Americans are extremely disinterested in bring attacked that way again, even 20 years later.
I don't want to get deep in 9/11 in particular, but mass surveillance wasn't the solution - the 5-eyes' toxic, oil-driven relationship with Saudi Arabia was a big factor, and the CIA not hiding information from the FBI would very likely have stopped it.
We've seen similar failings on a smaller scale with incidents in Europe, where the perpetrators were known to the authorities beforehand. Even where they communicated with each other "openly" using SMS, politicians called for a ban on encryption - these parasites take every opportunity to spread FUD and use it to their advantage.
I think where we at least agree is a belief that many people simply don't care; they don't understand the risks with the current government, let alone future ones.
> Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
If the result is (another) permanent loss of privacy and freedom akin to the PATRIOT act, then yes.
Technology has immense power to do good for people, but only if those who deploy it do so ethically. How many governments around the world can we honestly predict to do so?
Agree to disagree, because my liberty is useless without my life.
Balance can be found. And increasingly, it looks like in the modern era, the balance is found in a situation where the PATRIOT act exists and we find a new normal around its existence.
Which government of more than a few million people do you assume doesn't have a line into monitoring intra- and interstate digital communications in this era?
I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.
I regret that - assuming my own ongoing case of COVID-19 resolves without fatal complication - I'm quite likely, I think, to have that curiosity satisfied. I regret it because this isn't a cause for change of perspective which I would wish on anyone. But everything I'm seeing suggests it's a cause for change of perspective that many millions of people are going to have.
My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term in spite of the short term suffering we may experience. You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever. How many movements would have been impossible if a local government could spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now during the civil rights movement, for example.
Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when their time comes.
Of course, 'you can only surrender your rights once' and 'you can only die once' aren't equivalent either. Once a nation of people surrenders their rights, nobody ever has those rights again (even if the loss of those rights costs lives). A person, or a group of people, becoming ill or passing away doesn't take away the lives of the next generation.
If you think back on the experiences of the last century, how much harm would be done if we couldn't freely assemble because a government decided to intervene? We'd have stayed in Vietnam longer, black folks may not have ever won their civil rights, and its possible women would be unable to vote.
For the record, I don't downplay the suffering of illness. I've lost a parent to cancer, as well as many other family members. Everyone else alive is in the same boat. We're all mortal.
I honestly wonder if more people have been killed by dictators and authoritarian regimes or the black plague. I suspect it's relatively comparable. As technology has progressed, I believe it's become more reasonable to fear man more than nature.
Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a body; pathogens multiply within societies.
I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directional pressure here; maintaining rights feels like fighting entropy).
I am a parent, I want my child to live in a world where the government doesn't abuse and spy on them, but where that government is also capable of containing an infectious pathogen (whether natural or purpose-made) pretty much as soon as it registers. There is a practical balance to be found there.
(And if we're trading imaginary worlds: I want my child to live in a world where private entities don't spy on them and sell private information, a world where adtech doesn't exist.)
I want both freedom and a competent government. However, there's no need to spy on people to properly prepare for a pandemic. That said, given that governments have proven to be both incompetent and evil, why should I want to give them more power?
My comment regarding illness is only to reinforce the point that everyone is mortal, and the vast majority of us have empathy for others and value the lives of at least one other person.
> unlike life, rights can be won back
This costs lives. How many wars have been fought to overthrow evil regimes? How many journalists or 'other' people are killed or enslaved in the world today by evil regimes?
>I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.
> I'm curious how many people who now say "give me privacy or give me death!" will change their tune in a hurry once they are themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, in real danger of dying.
The weak ones we shouldn't be prioritizing over the strong. Harboring weakness is just asking to be taken advantage of. It may seem empathetic at first, but all you end up doing is undermining the individuals growth and selling out the security of future generations. If you're an adult, you need to come to terms with death, and recognize that extending your life isn't worth stealing from future generations. They deserve more freedom than we've had. Not less.
It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick, and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract about coming to terms with death than to face the imminent possibility.
edit: Well, you won't be held to it assuming we haven't reached a need for sufficiently severe triage, I suppose. Otherwise, you might get a chance to quite literally put your life on the line for the principle you've just espoused! I wish you joy of it.
All the soldiers, firefighters, and doctors/nurses/EMTs (and many more) are putting their lives on the line for what they believe in. Some of them believe in the constitution and some of them simply desire to help their fellow man. Not everyone is so weak that they sell out others for their own benefit, and assuming the worst of others only serves to expose your values, or lack thereof.
> I wish you joy of it.
That was straight-up evil. Whatever empathy and respect you may have had just went out the window. I'm almost in disbelief that you would edit your post just to literally wish someone the "joy" of having a chance to die.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. You've done it repeatedly in this thread. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong or bad another comment is, or you feel it is.
You seem to love misrepresenting people's views, or perhaps you just really don't comprehend them.
No, I don't think the unfortunate should be harmed or taken advantage of. I also don't think anyone should be forced to surrender their rights to governments, period. Everyone should have an equal opportunity to prosper in this world. That is impossible so long as there's some 'higher power' manipulating the system to the advantage of one group or another.
I hate war. I hate when the police enforce evil policies and eviscerate the lives of innocent people. I hate when governments play god and overthrow other governments for the financial gain of a select few.
You know what else I hate? When governments cover up the truth and cause massive pain and suffering. The Chinese government spies on their people, they used that system to silence the story about this virus which is now infecting people around the globe.
Giving up your right to privacy, speech, and defense is [1]literally exactly how this happened in the first place.
If the truth had gotten out sooner, it could have been contained. Instead, the world economy is grinding to a halt and people are dying. All thanks to a government spying on its people's cell phone
Meanwhile, contact tracing, in places like South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, appears to have made a major difference in the rate of transmission. In those countries, people have to some greater or lesser extent traded privacy for security, and - so far, at least - it appears to be working.
Is that a choice they all individually made? Of course not. There are penalties for noncompliance, same as for laws here in the US, whether you agree with them or not. Did that also, though, save a lot of lives? Ask again in a year, I suppose; it's too soon to tell.
But by the same token, it's too soon to call that a failure, at least if lives saved is a figure of merit.
I think it should be. I'm not averse in concept to the sacrifice of life in defense of principle, but I am very much averse to the sacrifice of some life in defense of others' principle.
You spoke earlier of the horrors of dictatorship, of totalitarianism, and the like? As far as I'm concerned, every one of them starts right here. If you want to die on behalf of whatever principles you hold dear, you're welcome. That's your life to spend. It is the only life that's yours to spend.
Yet you're advocating to arrange things for everyone according to your principles which can also, demonstrably, cost lives. I'm advocating that individuals make choices for themselves about when to work together to solve a crisis, or when to avoid one another, or when to collaborate with their government, or when to oppose it.
Totalitarian regimes start with the people being stripped of their freedoms. In every case throughout history, they have stripped people of their rights to speech and defense.
> I am very much averse to the sacrifice of some life in defense of others' principle.
Then advocate for a better healthcare system and government accountability. They don't need to have the system to track people in order to provide healthcare, restrict foreign travel, or issue public guidance on how to handle the situation.
Besides, most people would happily volunteer the information, assuming it was on their terms and reasonably secure. But it never is.
> lives saved figure of merit
I agree, it should be. But you're not counting the lives lost or destroyed by the choice you favor. The "compromise" isn't to give up rights, it's to improve healthcare and preparation for situations like this.
Evil regimes killed 100+ Million people in around a 100 year period. Not allowing governments the power to do that level of evil saves more lives than the coronavirus could ever take.
> Then advocate for a better healthcare system and government accountability
Yes. But failing that, I'll take contact tracing and risking fines for breaking quarantine - which I would now be liable for, assuming I had also even been able to be tested in order to become a confirmed case, which is apparently too much to ask at the moment - over the combination of adtech surveillance for no greater point than to make money, and incompetent government response that seems all but guaranteed to end five or six figures' worth of lives minimum, that we have now.
>It's a mercy you won't be held to this when you get sick, and find it's somewhat easier to talk in the abstract about coming to terms with death than to face the imminent possibility.
It's unfortunate that you're a coward.
Death is not something to fear, and with a stock of strong pain killers neither is dying.
Sure, assuming you have the good fortune to choose your manner of dying. I wouldn't feel very comfortable making that kind of assumption. But I concede it's easier to sling accusations of cowardice than to think seriously about drowning slowly and helplessly in the fluids of your own destroyed lungs.
Congratulations on having gotten over this pandemic virus. Good luck with the next one!
Reflecting on how my relationship with death has varied with my life experiences, I don't think you know enough about his particular experience to call him a coward.
> Would you suggest that we not have public health departments engage in contact tracing at all to combat the pandemic? If so, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's fine, but as Jean Yang pointed out on Twitter, no-one would ordinarily call disclosing everyone you'd shared a location with over weeks "privacy-preserving". And once you've done it for some large fraction of infected people, you end up with a country-wide social graph built up, even though you weren't conducting mass surveillance in the usual meaning.
It's a loss of privacy either way (whether done via location or Bluetooth contact). I'd rather just have the conversation about how we've decided to suspend physical metadata privacy to combat the pandemic, than act like the Singapore model is going to preserve it.
What data is collected? Are you able to see my personal data?
The only data that we collect is your mobile number, so that MOH can contact you more quickly if you were in close proximity to a COVID-19 case.
With your consent, TraceTogether exchanges Bluetooth proximity data with nearby phones running the same app. However, this data is anonymised and encrypted, and does not reveal your identity or the other person's identity. Also, this data is stored only on the user’s phone. Should MOH need the data for contact tracing, they will seek your consent to share it with them.
"Never let a serious crisis go to waste" - Rahm Emanuel.
I agree with this and your sentiment, but I think it is misplaced in this instance.
As I understand it, the TraceTogether app collects (and stores locally), information on other users running the TraceTogether app nearby. If our government's contact tracers contact us, we can provide the information, and it can help in contact tracing. This seems to me to be at or near the minimum amount of information collection necessary to fulfil the function. Assuming voluntary widespread adoption, it is useful, and can be uninstalled at any time once the crisis blows over.
Honestly, as both a free software and privacy advocate... yeah. If contact tracing significantly improves our ability to eliminate the epidemic, and my current understanding is that it does, this seems like a pretty good implementation. So long as the data collection is explicitly voluntary, I'm asked for my permission first, and it's for an important cause like this one... I really don't mind!
I would much rather have a system like this than to be indiscriminately tracked and lose more privacy potentially indefinitely. The tracking can't be indefinite if I'm asked for permission, because if I don't think there's good reason for it I'll just say no. And if I'm worried the app's privacy measures aren't good enough and it'll be abused, I'll just uninstall it.
You can still turn it off by heading to settings and turning it off there (both WiFi and Bluetooth).
It turns the functionality off completely, and stays off until you manually turn it back on.
In control centre it only partially turns off. But that’s not unreasonable as many people don’t understand how many feature rely on Bluetooth. They would probably get annoyed when the stop working, just because they wanted to quickly disconnect some headphones.
That’s tricky without building a phone yourself from opensource hardware and software.
At least with Apple, they’re under so much scrutiny you can be fairly confident that if their software was lying it would quickly appear in the news.
Finally the above clearly shows that your assertion you can’t turn off the WiFi or Bluetooth radios is false (assuming the software isn’t outright lying, if think that then you should have said so in your first comment).
That's an old principle, and it is, unfortunately, still true. It all depends on where you want to put the trust slider, but push it far enough in the conservative direction and, yes, you enter "build your own machine from scratch" territory.
How do you know the hardware you use doesn't have a microdot that can bypass the monitoring logic and physically manipulate the radio without the OS's consent?
How do you know the software you're running doesn't embed its own bluetooth stack and use a 0-day exploit to gain physical control over the radio?
Oh, you compiled it yourself? With whose compiler? Are you sure that compiler faithfully adheres to the spec of the language and doesn't know how to embed a bluetooth stack that, etc.
Push the paranoia slider far enough, and you end up having to care about all this stuff.
This is much better than tracking people via facial and video recognition captured with near-omnipresent camera feeds. This is tracking signals that an optional device optionally broadcasts (and has for years). You can easily avoid this tracking by not having your phone broadcast bluetooth or by not carrying a phone.
Not to mention any number of actors could have already been tracking this signal for years. It's the nature of how bluetooth devices broadcast their presence.
I'm curious as a non-expert what's specifically worrying about their privacy model?
My intuition is that rapid adoption of a relatively transparent privacy-preseving option could preempt more heavy-handed approaches to what could be a very valuable public health intervention.
I'd agree if remote tracking was the only option, and if there was a guaranteed policy against public backslash towards those that don't comply out of privacy reasons (which would skyrocket in a health hazard emergency).
These privacy exceptions all affected goverments are talking about (Italy being a great example, viz. Veneto region governor asking for a change in privacy laws the other day) are not going to magically disappear once the coast is clear, just like post 9/11 emergency laws still being used in the US.
I believe there are other ways to help people and that, if you are a government that claims having to resort to remote control its popoulation, maybe your power is either insufficient for your secret expansion goals or you're an inefficient populist.
Every (western) government publicly hates the Chinese government but they do seem to have wet dreams about the population control bit, especially when backed by corporations.
Exactly. People are decrying this because it gives governments capabilities, as if decrying its existence changes that capability model or implies that in the absence of this tool and in a state of emergency, governments wouldn't be stuck trying to accomplish the same goals this tool enables using cruder methods that would be more intrusive to people's lives.
It's like hating gunpowder exists because people can make bullets and fight wars with it.
We all carry around a radio that broadcasts our location. I guess we'll end up switching off Bluetooth except to known good devices, or when we intentionally want to discover what's around us.
I don't know, I'd probably turn mine on just so that I can get notified if I am within proximity of a high infection risk stranger. I would love to have that kind of notification.
I can imagine something like that could lead to people abusing, beating up or killing the infected. It might sound far-fetched, but this was happening in Kenya quite recently.
I think in these extraordinary times, it’s nice to see the government proactively trying to do more to counteract the worst pandemic the country has ever seen. As much as we might all cry foul over the curtailing of freedom, there is a lot to be said in this current environment about contact tracers immediately knowing who a known covid carrier has come in contact with, which in turn means a speedier response from the medical teams.
That being said though, the app is absolute garbage on iPhone. Obviously not really their fault, but needing to have the app actively on for it to work is absolutely going to lead to people not bothering to turning it on.
I agree this is bad, but I don't understand why it is. Not an iOS developer but I was under the impression apps can run in the background to maintain Bluetooth connections.
Assuming Apple's policies are in fact preventing them from running in the background, does Apple have a mechanism to grant them an exception for this use case? Does someone have a contact at Apple who could reach out to them?
It should be opt-in, if you don't opt-in,mandatory quara tine for you. And this should not be something they can renew after the crisis like the US Patriot act.
Sadly this won't happen in the US. Even if it's really private, people won't install it unless it's pushed down to them as an update from above, and no company will want to be the first to push it.
I suspect the bigger issue is people don't want to be told by an app that they need to go get tested.
Come to think of it, cities like New York could push it as part of a bigger, more comprehensive covid app...
It is not a mobile app. You export your data from Google (thanks GDPR!), and filter out personally identifiable data points before submitting. We also let you know exactly who is about to use your donated data (we only allow academic researchers to have access), and give you advance notice so you can delete it if you don’t want your data to be used in a particular project.
We are MIT licensed and are figuring out how to make data donation safe via UX and engineering. We need all the help we can get - even if it’s just feedback. Feel reach out! Nessup@gmail.com
Once you have an identified case, you trace who they have been in close contact with recently and start contacting/testing/isolating them and trace it further from there
E.g. In Switzerland this was done manually (by medical staff mostly i think) in the very beginning, but they gave up very quickly on it because of lack of resources.
For context, Singapore has a team of 20 that can call contacts of confirmed cases, they are able to make 4000 calls a day. Those in contact with confirmed cases are made to a mandatory home quarantine, i think something like 35k people in Singapore are currently serving home quarantines.
As I understand, contact tracking is recording which people come into proximity so that if one gets sick the task of contact tracing can be facilitated by the contract tracking data.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/mit-researchers-launch-location...
[2] https://safepaths.mit.edu/